The Future Fire: 2026.75 fiction prata

[Issue 2026.75]

‘Prata Neptunia’, S.J. Ladds

by Brooke Nila—21st June 2065

(Not cool.)

In order for you to get the whole picture, I must start at the the beginning—the very beginning.

I was sixteen when the International Ocean Centre for Marine Research, colloquially known as the IOC, was floated out into the middle of the Pacific. In fact, I watched it cast off during a maths lesson; my phone hidden under my desk, the same eyes a space-obsessed child might have watched the moon landing with back in 1969. I must have rewatched its launch almost a hundred times in the following weeks. Over breakfast, during lunch, at the dinner table, when someone was having a rather dull conversation in my vicinity. YouTube eventually grew so bored of me that it gave up on suggesting other videos and left the IOC’s maiden voyage at the very top of my feed.

It was not something I would soon forget.

I took biology, chemistry, sociology and English at college to prepare for a marine biology degree that I hoped to turn into a doctorate. But I was twenty-one, on a placement year with ORCA, when the IOC cut off all contact with the government agencies that had funded it, and the media seemed to forget it had ever existed. And I was twenty-three, fresh off a journalism course and setting up my own ecojournalism platform, when the IOC was declared a terrorist organisation by the very people who had greenlit its formation.

It took less than five years for the researchers of what they deemed Prata Neptunia, Latin for Neptune’s meadow, to realise that the true terrorists were the industries and capitalists destroying the oceans for profit. And instead of rolling over and giving up in the face of an insurmountable Goliath, David picked up his slingshot and stones and got to work.

David Askwith, senior researcher and project manager of the IOC, was a man whose poster I had on my wall all through university. I wish I could say this was simply a turn of phrase, but my nerdiness unfortunately knows no bounds. I had ripped a picture of him out of an issue of the National Geographic and taped it to my wall, security deposit be damned. Truth be told, I had the entire crew of Prata Neptunia up in my room. Kaimana and Ariel and Alandra. All their glossy faces staring down at me as I studied, and watched Attenborough documentaries, and fell asleep to dream of one day meeting them somehow.

It would be three long years before that dream came true.

Three years of visiting protected ocean sites like the Channel Islands and Papahānaumokuākea. Three years of attending protests against overfishing and deforestation and poaching. Three years of getting arrested alongside Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion at demonstrations. Three painstaking years of sending email after email after email to every address related to the IOC and Prata Neptunia I could find until one bright, sunny day in April of this year when my phone pinged.

I was in line at the local eco store with an emergency loo roll I’d had to run down the road for and a paper bag full of chocolate covered macadamia nuts that had been a bit of an impulse grab on my way to the till. My phone vibrated in my pocket, and long since having given up on hearing from the IOC, I checked the notification with the indifference of someone about to swipe away a text from their broadband provider about this month’s bill.

But there, splashed across my screensaver of a blue whale—which I’d yet to see with my own eyes—was Ariel Fontaine’s email address, Ariel Fontaine’s “Dear Brooke”, Ariel Fontaine’s thanks for my determination and enthusiasm. I fumbled to open my email, almost spilling the macadamia nuts everywhere, and scanned it with hungry eyes.

Today, I could recite that message to you word for word from memory alone. That day all I could remember were the words “we will permit you a visit in June”.

I abandoned my loo roll, a decision I would come to regret two hours later, and sprinted back home to my laptop; this was not an email you sent from your mobile phone, that much I knew.

It was, in actuality, not an email you sent at all apparently. For three days after this, there was a knock at my door, and a man in a sleek black suit on the other side. He was a stern-faced guy, sandy hair slicked back with enough gel it could have constituted the world’s smallest oil spill, dark weaselly eyes and a prominent vein pulsing on his left temple.

“Brooke Nila?” His accent threw me off. American, somewhere Southern maybe, no clue. I was a little distracted by the scent coming off him, that musky mildewy sort of smell that clothes got after being screwed up in the back of a drawer for too long.

“Who’s asking?” Not my finest moment, but it’s only so often I get to feel like the protagonist of an action movie.

“Agent Farlane, C.I.A.” He flashed me his badge. “May I come in?”

“My parents said I should never let strange men into my flat.”

“And my bosses say I should stop asking for permission.”

“Dangerous precedent to set.”

He heaved a sigh.

“I need to talk to you about your involvement in the vandalism of a logging facility in the Amazon earlier this year.”

Shit.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. You must have the wrong person.” I smiled sweetly and went to close the door, but Farlane’s big hand slammed against the wood.

“That might have been convincing if you hadn’t posted an article about it.” He handed me a printed version of said article, slightly crumpled from being in his pocket, and raised an eyebrow. “Now, you can let me in and hear what I have to say, or I can give the police your address and all the evidence they need to lock you up.”

Shoulders slumping, I held the door open for him. He had a perfunctory look around the place, and I became cripplingly aware of how long it had been since I’d last cleaned up. But I would not let him see my discomfort, so I leant in the open doorway with my arms folded over my chest and an expression of guarded indifference on my face.

“You were careful not to implicate yourself or give any details of your accomplices, I’ll give you that. But not careful enough. We caught one of your friends sabotaging a logging truck last month, and they gave us names in return for a reduced sentence. Piecing together the rest of your articles, we have enough to put you away for a very long time, Ms. Nila.”

Fuck.

“Unless you’re willing to cooperate.” Here he gave me plenty of time to object. To sacrifice myself for the cause. “Alright then. We have reason to believe you’ve been in contact with the IOC.”

Shitfuck.

“We have further reason to believe you’ll be visiting them in June.”

“You’re reading my fucking emails.”

“You’re corresponding with known terrorists. We have to read your fucking emails.” He rubbed at the furrow of his brow with his knuckle and took a deep breath. “If you do not want to go to jail for the rest of your life, you will wear a wire to the IOC.”

“No. No way.”

“I know you’re obsessed with them and have been since you were sixteen or whatever, so you probably feel some misplaced loyalty towards them, but you have no idea why they were classified as terrorists.”

“That’s what I was going to find out.”

“And you will. But you will bring us back evidence of their terrorism—”

“Wait.” I shook my head. “You don’t have evidence of their terrorism?”

“That’s not what I said—”

“It’s what you implied.”

“Just do what I say,” he snapped, pinching the bridge of his nose. “We’ll be in touch when you hear back from Dr. Fontaine.”

He brushed past me, making sure to knock his shoulder into mine, and I slammed the door shut behind him, locking it and sliding the deadbolt across.

My communication with Dr. Fontaine was sparse at best. She sent no receipt of my response, perhaps put off by the sheer intensity of my passion, in fact she did not reply at all. By the time June rolled around, I was sure they had changed their minds and figured I was a bullet best to dodge.

My communication with Agent Farlane, on the other hand, was far too thorough. A varied mix of thinly veiled threats, bald-faced insults and coddling promises. The CIA, much to my dismay, had not changed their minds.

Ten days before Ariel’s suggested date, I received an email with a time, place, dock and ship. Three minutes after that, I received an email with a coffeeshop near to the dock and a time half an hour before Dr. Fontaine’s. I packed my bags immediately.

My journey began at a shitty little American-themed diner with a cup of burnt coffee and a stack of waffles on the C.I.A.’s dime.

“I’m going to need your bra,” Farlane said as he sat down.

“Buy me breakfast first.”

“Fine.”

Remember, folks, it’s as easy as that.

I went to the bathroom after ordering my food and wriggled out of my sports bra, hitting my elbow on the cubicle wall no less than six times—for which I would be claiming compensation—and took it back to the table, tossing it at Farlane’s face. He picked it up as if I’d thrown him a pair of used period pants and slid a small black tube into the lining before handing it back to me.

“Go put it back on.”

“What’s the magic word?” I trilled. If a CIA agent got to make me undress in a diner bathroom, I sure as hell got to piss him off a little.

“Please.”

When I came back, dirty, corrupted, guilt-ridden sports bra on, our food had arrived. Farlane was delicately dipping carefully sliced sections of his pancakes into his coffee. It was somehow both the most human and most alien he’d ever looked.

“Do not take that off until you are back in this diner with me.”

“But what happens if I meet a sexier C.I.A. agent?”

“If you do not hand that device back to me in two weeks’ time, you will be locked away for the rest of your life.”

And thus, my journey to the IOC began, Farlane’s breath forever at the back of my neck.

It was not a simple one. Almost a week I spent hopping from ship to ship, from wildlife boat tour to ferry, from dinghy to motorboat, from skiff to the floating colony of Prata Neptunia. Words cannot describe what it felt like watching that manmade landmass crest over the horizon. Whatever emotion that bobbing colony evoked in me, I’m just grateful for the sea spray that disguised my tears.

The IOC had been inspired by the Great pacific Garbage Patch, that island of plastic refuse we had so carelessly created in our magnificent oceans. The IOC, however, was a much more beautiful—and purposeful—feat of human ingenuity. Made from almost entirely recycled plastic, and the longest steel anchor on the planet, Neptunia looked like a gathering of bubbles in your bath. Like an aquatic Eden Project. From the programme literature, I knew it to be a hectare of plastic land with individual pods for the researchers, multiple laboratories, a communal hall and a dock.

In reality, it had grown an acre at least, more slapdash pods erected on the outskirts and tethered to the island with both chain and rope for safety. The crew had been busy since their excommunication from land, and their family had almost certainly grown during their self-imposed exile.

It was Ariel Fontaine who came to fetch me from the skiff in a green two-person kayak. Her red hair and purple bikini made her look every bit her Disney namesake, but her sunglasses had an air of The Terminator about them.

“Brooke Nila?” she called out, laying her paddle over her lap. I was so starstruck all I could do was nod. An arched, unruly eyebrow poked out from above her shades. “I’m gonna need the password, landlubber.”

“Oh! Right, yes, of course, sorry!” It was the arch of her other eyebrow that made me realise I still had not given the password. “Atlantìs nêsos.”

“D’accord.” She tossed me the spare paddle sticking out of the boat, and I almost toppled right into the water trying to catch it. “Hope you’re ready to paddle against the Pacific current.”

“Uhhh…”

As someone who hadn’t been to the gym since my uni’s free tester day for freshers, I’m more than a little ashamed to admit I gawked at Dr Fontaine’s biceps like a frat boy’s first time in Hooter’s. But those biceps gave me the courage I needed to sling my backpack over my shoulder and climb down into the kayak; I alone might have been swept away by the waves, but with Ariel’s paddle accompanying me, I figured we’d manage a slow trek towards the ocean hamlet.

And right I was. It took us fifteen minutes to get back to the IOC, after the five minutes it had taken Ariel to get to our skiff. She assured me it was all in the direction of the current, but I felt about as ill-prepared as a whale on their first trip to the beach. And a beached whale I resembled as I heaved myself onto the ebbing and swaying platform of the Neptunia’s docks. Ariel disembarked like a dolphin leaping from the water and stood over me with a wrinkled nose.

“Did you bring it?”

Of all the times for my brain to first work without delay in the company of one of my idols, it makes sense that it was upon mention of the one very strange request I had been given in Ariel’s email. I unhooked my drawstring bag from my pack and handed it over to her, feeling immediately lighter for it. Ariel peeked inside at the bountiful supply of suncream I had swept off a superstore’s shelf—and almost bankrupted myself for. She beamed as brilliantly as the sun above.

“Welcome aboard.” She offered me a hand and tugged me to my feet.

I was no stranger to sea travel, even dicey sea travel, but I could not fathom how Ariel was managing to walk. Imagine, if you will, how it feels to walk on a bouncy castle, combine it with the rocking of the sea and the sinking sensation of quicksand and you will almost be stumbling right alongside me.

Of course, it would be remiss of me to leave it at that. To fulfil my role as journalist, I must paint the rest of the picture for you. The dazzling blue of the ocean and the blinding reflection of the sun off the waves. The slosh of the water and the creak of the plastic in the wind. The musk of salt and fish heavy on the tongue and a crisp clean air that could only come from a place so untouched by human greed. All of this overcame me as Ariel led me through the colony.

People stopped to stare as we passed. It is hard to explain the welcoming hostility that I was greeted with on Prata Neptunia. It was not a personal slight, but the suspicion any closed community might greet an outsider with. And though an inherent awkwardness gripped me, I did not feel uncomfortable, or not in the way you might expect. For even from my first wobbly steps aboard the plastic island, I could tell their close-knit borders were to keep hatred and cruelty from getting in. It was only the little plastic tube in my bra strap that provoked any discomfort in me.

Ariel paid them—nor my incompetent, bumbling walk—any mind. I, however, took it all in greedily, counting shaved heads until I was certain Ariel must be the only Neptunian with hair past her shoulders. And though their clothes were all made of waterproof fabric, everyone else was a lot more covered up than Ariel too. In shorts and t-shirts at the very least, if not full wetsuit-like outfits complete with hats that strapped beneath their chins to keep them from flying away on the strong ocean gusts.

I felt woefully overdressed in my zip-away cargo pants and cotton shirt plastered with ocean wildlife, but that tee had gotten me through no-end of sea voyages unscathed. I could not bear to part with it. And, naively, I had thought it might endear me to a crew of marine biologists and the like.

Our first stop was what would be my quarters. I had expected one of the hastily attached pods I had noticed upon my arrival for my lack of status aboard the IOC, but, to my surprise, I was given a pod right in the centre of the colony. Perhaps it was for safety, both mine and the colony’s, to keep a close eye on me so I might not be plucked away by the wind or leak coordinates to a government agency. Both were equally as likely, I suppose. Perhaps it was just that Ariel did not think I would have made it to one of the exterior quarters with my shoddy sea legs.

It was a simple pod. A plastic hemisphere lined with some black material that blocked out both light and heat and provided me with a bit of privacy. Though they had the look of a greenhouse, the pods were quite pleasantly temperate and only smelt the slightest bit like the inside of a plastic bag. There was a blow-up mattress, desk and desk chair attached to the floor to keep from shifting, a solar-powered lantern hanging from the ceiling and a single outlet for electronics. I dumped my bag on the bed, grabbed my non-government-issued tape recorder and headed back out to Ariel.

She all but dragged me over to one of the laboratories, the straps of the suncream bag wound tightly around her freckled hands. Inside, two people awaited our arrival, and my heart leapt at the sight of them. They did not even have to turn for me to recognise them. I’d seen enough of their backs in documentary B-roll to know Doctors David Askwith and Kaimana Akau, the senior researchers of the IOC.

David’s decade at sea had aged him beyond his years. The last picture of him to exist in the media was a lightly sunburnt bald-headed David waving and smiling tight-lipped at a passing photographer. He had been fifty-eight in that picture. Now, sixty-three and thoroughly grizzled by the unrelenting sun, he was wrinkled and leather-skinned, but still as young in his grey-blue eyes as he was in his university graduate photo. His hesitant smile made me sweat.

Kaimana was five years older than her last picture, waving right beside David on the edge of Neptunia, but she didn’t seem to have aged a day since then. In fact, the only changes were the numerous tattoos she’d added to her collection. What had once been a few bands on her wrists had transformed into entire sleeves, her right arm covered in turtles woven together in a complex pattern, and her left all shark teeth. There had been a new addition to her calf that I’d noticed when her back was turned, a swirling stingray that I would never overcome my tongue-tied, starstruck nature enough to ask her about.

Suddenly, stood in front of my two idols, the recording device in my bra sat heavy as a rock.

“Brooke, I presume.” David stepped forward to shake my hand, and I held my breath in hopes that he wouldn’t notice the slight tremble to it.

“Y-yes, Dr Askwith.” To my unrelenting horror, my mouth did not stop there. “I am a huge, huge, huge fan. I have been for years. You’re actually what got me into marine biology. Well, not exactly. I was already obsessed. You’re just what made me decide to make a career of it. Not that I have. Journalism and all. But, um… Sorry.” I hung my head to hide the flush of my cheeks. “What I mean is: it is the greatest honour of my life that you have allowed me to write about your life on Prata Neptunia.”

Benevolent beings that they were, nobody in that room laughed.

“From what Ariel tells me, your passion and persistence are a force to be reckoned with.” The flush on my cheeks deepened, and David politely pretended not to notice. “We need more people like that behind our cause and, truth be told, we’ve been trying to find a writer of some sorts to document what we’re doing here. We were going to keep it internal, but Ariel told us of your emails.”

The woman in question shot me a thumbs up before dumping the suncream unceremoniously onto a nearby lab table.

“We read your work,” Kaimana interjected. I tried to quiet the steady chanting of they read my work, they read my work, the crew of the IOC read my fucking work! in my head, so I could hear the rest of what she had to say. “The way you write… You have a command of language that you can tell comes from a background of academic papers but without being inaccessible. You bring a personal, humorous touch to clinical and complex ideas.” The Kaimana Akau is analysing my writing style—what the actual fuck. (Excuse my fangirling, I was going to edit it out, but Ariel insisted I keep it in). “We felt your voice and values would do our story the most justice.”

“Dr. Akau, I cannot tell you how much that means to me.” I may as well have fallen to my knees and started kissing her aqua socks. “I’ve read all of your papers at least ten times each. My dissertation supervisor scolded me for reading your work over his recommendations that were actually on-topic, but I couldn’t stop. I mean, my flatmates held a jokey intervention because I was skipping nights out when you dropped a new paper.”

The smile that crested on Kaimana’s face was worth every drop of humiliation burning my cheeks.

“I look forward to hearing more about that when I show you around.”

I’m not sure how long I malfunctioned here, but it was long enough that David had to stifle a laugh in his elbow.

“I’ll be your onsite guide. You’ll be accompanied by someone else for any excursions off the island we deem appropriate for you to go on.”

Excursions, Dr Akau my guide, and a professional obligation to pick her brains? Whatever the conditions of the ocean around us, I knew these next few days would be the highlight of my life.

“I can’t wait.”

I’ll spare you the details of the rest of that day as I tried—and failed—to find my sea legs. David asked that dinner that night be off the record, and though I broke that vow long before I’d made it, I refuse to publish our conversation in this article. Not in the least because it spares me the second-hand embarrassment from some of my interactions with the crew. And for journalistic integrity and whatnot.

DAY ONE

Kaimana roused me bright and early and, upon seeing the lingering exhaustion from my journey, took me to the docks. She didn’t utter a word until we were stood at the edge of one of the plastic jetties.

“Jump.”

I blinked.

“Sorry?”

“The water will wake you up. We do it all the time.”

Not wanting to live up to my reputation as an outsider any more than I already had, I jumped in with only the briefest of thoughts of the recording device in my bra.

(If they hadn’t given me a waterproof mic to record an ocean colony, that was on them.)

The water was so cold my cannonball turned into the foetal position the moment I was swallowed up. Actually, that’s too nice a turn of phrase for how it felt to disappear into the chilly, bottomless waters of the Pacific. I was wrenched beneath its surface as if a great icy kraken had reached up from the depths of the ocean floor and curled a tentacle around my ankle.

Some animal instinct long dormant in me awoke and had me kicking for the surface. I breached with a gulping, spluttering gasp, arms flailing for anything to hold onto. Saltwater had found its way into my eyes despite how tightly I’d squeezed them shut during my plunge, and I could see no more than a big blur of blue all around me. The salt had burnt through my nostrils all the way to the back of my throat too, and the pain of it on top of the shock and blindness must have made me look even more pathetic than I possibly could have imagined.

So pathetic I must have looked that Kaimana threw me a life ring. Or, at least, that’s what I thought it to be as it splashed into the water beside me and I grabbed a hold of it like the lifeline it was. She reeled me in and hauled me back onto Prata Neptunia where I lay coughing and squirming like a fish on the deck of a trawler.

When I finally managed to peel my sore eyes open, Kaimana stood over me with poorly supressed amusement dancing behind her blank expression. She helped me sit up, draping a thick towel over my shoulders that I clutched onto like a child would their favourite blankie.

“Here.” She handed me a bottle of water. “Wash the salt from your mouth.”

I swilled my mouth out with half the bottle, spitting it out into the ocean with an apology to any passing fish, then drained the rest in three big pulls.

“Well,” I coughed. “I’m definitely awake.”

“That’s the spirit.” She clapped me on the shoulder and pulled me to my feet. “You’ll warm with the work in no time. It’s a hot one today too. You’ll be missing the chill come noon.”

“I highly doubt that,” I said. Or, I would have had my teeth not been chattering almost out of my skull.

My first job aboard the IOC was to help with the harvest.

The Neptunia gardens were a thing to behold. Around 300 square feet of fertilised soil overflowing with various fruits and vegetables. The world’s biggest raised planter. (Don’t factcheck me on that.) Potatoes, tomatoes, green beans, peas, chillies, bell peppers, onions, corn, courgettes, cauliflower. Strawberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, and even a few orange trees. A floating allotment. An orchard on the ocean.

The unseasonably warm spring we’d had this year meant most of the fruit and veg were ripe for the picking, so Dr Akau handed me a basket and took me over to the other harvesters gathered at the edge of the gardens. Our preliminary introductions, however, were interrupted by a familiar face.

Short mop of curly brown hair, those big brown eyes and that doleful expression that proclaimed ‘butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth’ even as they were being arrested for ecoterrorism.

Blue Campbell.

The last I’d seen of them had been in my brief stint with the Root Defenders when we’d torched a logging facility before it started on the last few remaining trees of the Amazon—I wondered briefly if the person Farlane had questioned had given Blue’s name to the C.I.A. too. Most of the Root Defenders had eyed me with a superior indifference, assuming I was there only to observe and write, but Blue could see the truth of my presence; I was there to help. They invited me into the fold, and we became fast friends.

Blue was my go-to contact for years until one day they vanished off the face of the earth. I’d assumed they must have been arrested on a more serious charge than usual, undergoing incarceration rather than being subject to bail, but I hadn’t been able to find any new blemishes on their records no matter how much I searched. Now, their disappearance made sense. Of course they’d fled to Prata Neptunia.

“Babbling Brooke!” Blue crowed, throwing their arms around me with such force my unseaworthy legs didn’t stand a chance.

We went toppling to the floor and bounced off the plastic with a groaning squeak.

“Sorry.” I winced as Blue peeled themself off me. “I can barely support my own weight.”

“Yeah, it takes a hot minute to get used to.” Their appeasing humility was undermined by the infuriatingly easy plank they were in over my prone and aching body.

“Fuck off.” I pushed them off me and, ignoring their laugh, struggled to my feet. Blue had to catch me in a stumble, their own feet already planted in a stance I couldn’t quite make sense of, and I tried turning it into what I hoped look like a purposeful hug. “And fuck you for vanishing on me.”

“Sorry, I didn’t really have a choice.” Something pained twisted their expression. “I wanted to tell you, but…” I wondered if my emails weren’t the only ones being read by the C.I.A.-C.U.N.T.S. “Guess my message in a bottle didn’t reach you.” A lopsided smile, and Blue was linking my arm and dragging me into the vegetable patch.

We caught up whilst plucking tomatoes from vines and unearthing potatoes, but, much like dinner the previous night, I struck this from my records. Not at Blue’s request but out of courtesy to a dear friend.

Kaimana afforded us the same privacy until our harvest was all but done.

“Thank you for your help,” she said as I laid my last basket down in front of one of our runners who would cart the haul off to the kitchen in the communal hall.

“No, thank you. My work is always ten times better when I’m able to fully immerse myself in what I’m writing about.” I unfolded myself from the stooped position I’d locked myself into during picking and stretched until at least four of my vertebrae cracked in gratitude. Kaimana grimaced. “And these gardens are one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. I mean, I saw pictures during your first few years here, but they were never this… impressive.”

It seemed too simple a word to capture the sheer grandeur of the gardens, but I was at a loss for anything more fitting.

“If you think this is impressive,” Kaimana said with a grin, “wait ’til you see our second garden.”

She was walking away before I could even think to question her. I knew better than to lag behind—how long would it take me to catch up when I could only walk the way a toddler could?—so I staggered after her like a drunk trying to get to the pub before lock-in. She led me to another dock-like structure, ribs of inflated plastic stretching out across the ocean.

At first, I thought she was going to ask me to jump into the water again and, with the sweat I’d worked up under the unrelenting sun, I wasn’t all that opposed to a second dip—especially now that I knew what to expect. However, a flash of something in the water caught my eye. I couldn’t make it out for a long moment, the light reflected off the waves near-blinding, but the combination of a squint and a well-timed cloud revealed an entirely different colony just beneath the surface of the water.

Phytoplankton. A whole farm of it. And now I knew what to look for, I could see it stretching almost as far as the horizon. At least three hectares of phytoplankton growing around the IOC. The implications of this garden were even more impressive than the vegetable garden’s appearance, hell, existence.

Phytoplankton produce over half the world’s oxygen, an estimated fifty to eighty-five per cent, and absorb about forty percent of the world’s carbon dioxide. They are our greatest allies in the fight against pollution. Not to mention their role as bottom of the food chain. Phytoplankton are the main source of nutrition for the tiniest minnow all the way to the largest humpback whale.

“Oh, my God.”

“The world may have turned their backs on us,” Dr Akau said, “but we have not turned our back on them.” She levelled me with a single look, the fate of an entire planet in the depths of her brown eyes. “We do this for humanity secondarily; I want to make that clear. A lot of humans don’t deserve what we’re doing here, but we do not believe in punishing the many for the few. But, first and foremost, we do this for Papatūānuku, Mother Earth, or whatever you may call her.”

A couple of scientists I recognised from the IOC’s personnel page on the website, Doctors Dosela and Hoarau, were unfurling a giant sheet of the black material lining every personal pod. They walked it over the plankton, each on an opposite rib of plastic. Kaimana explained that this was to protect it from the intense solar radiation forecasted for that day, left uncovered the plankton could fall victim to photodegradation which they liked to avoid at all costs the way one might protect their plants from slugs.

To you, a field of green sludge in the ocean might sound unremarkable. Disgusting. Maybe even counterproductive. You could be forgiven for thinking so, but this was a feat of biological engineering the likes of which had never been seen before. The densest forest of phytoplankton anywhere in the world. An all-natural air purification factory. A veritable banquet for marine life to feast on.

So awestruck by it I was that Kaimana took me back to my pod under the guise of giving me the rest of the day to start writing.

I’ll admit I got precious little done that evening. Mainly I searched through my downloads folder for the PDF version of Dr Akau’s paper on how phytoplankton would save the world. This was the first thing I’d read at university that had changed my brain’s chemistry. Such was its impact on me that I ran to a tattoo parlour the very next day and got a phytoplankton cell inked onto the inside of my right wrist. And the closing line of her conclusion was permanently etched into my brain:

If something so microscopic can do so much good simply by working as one, imagine what humanity could do together.

DAY TWO

To my surprise, it was not Dr Akau who came to wake me that morning but Dr Askwith—who insisted upon me calling him David, much to my delight. Backlit by the sun and wearing his mischievous grin, he appeared to me as if a silhouette of foreboding.

“I heard Kaimana gave you the Neptunian baptism yesterday.”

“It wasn’t my finest moment.” I shuddered at the thought of both my scientific heroes witnessing such a pathetic version of myself.

“All the more reason to be sorry I missed it. We are most ourselves when we surface from the water. Be it pool, lake, sea or ocean.” David had not yet given me the greenlight to turn on my tape recorder, but this was a sentiment I would not forget any time soon.

We headed to the docks once I was dressed for the day and, there, we were met by Marlin Fisk. A middle-aged man with dark skin, kind eyes and a stooped posture that suggested he’d spent most of his life bent double over the railing of a boat.

David introduced us, and Marlin shook my hand with a smile before drifting over to the stern of the boat. I figured either my harvesting skills were of a height they deemed invaluable—doubtful—or my awe at the plankton fields had left Kaimana with the notion that I was here for the right reasons. Why else would they be taking me on an excursion on only my second full day on Prata Neptunia?

(Maybe, just maybe, they were shipping me off back to land already, unwilling to wait the few days it would take to arrange external transport.)

(It’s not like I didn’t deserve it.)

Marlin took us out about a mile or so from the colony before dropping anchor. For a long moment, we simply rocked on the waves, the gentle lap of the water against the hull of the boat the only sound. Then Marlin unearthed a cast net from under a sheet of tarp.

“We’re fishing?” I balked, wishing I could suck the words right back in.

Marlin raised an eyebrow at David.

David just sighed.

“Get your tape recorder out.” I did so silently. “To save the ocean we do not need to be anti-fishing but anti-industry. It is not the act of fishing that destroys entire underwater eco-systems. Fish have sustained communities all over the world for centuries without problem. It was only the industrialisation of the process that caused havoc. The ever-increasing consumerism of a capitalist society that demands more fish at a faster pace and a better price. Conscious fishermen with nets cause no more damage than a child accidentally standing on an anthill.”

“I’m a fifth-generation fisherman,” Marlin said, slinging the net over his shoulder. “My family have relied on fishing to feed their families for over a century. We fish what we can eat and a little more to sell. Specific species decided by the tides. Any others we put back. We do that here.”

Without another word, he spun and tossed the net in an effortless arc over the ocean. It landed with a neat little splash and vanished into the water.

“Is this the main way your family would fish?” I asked in the stillness that followed.

“No, no. We use traps, spears, hook-and-line. It is always better to use things that allow for specificity.”

“Quality over quantity,” David agreed.

“Exactly. But traps and spears are not so good in such deep waters, so we use the net.” He turned to look at me over his shoulder. “Help me pull it up.”

I sprung up from beside David and grabbed a hold of the lead line, as I would later discover it to be called. Together, we dragged the net up and over the side of the boat, dropping it to the deck. It was not the haul I expected. A handful of fish wiggled around in the net, most of which Marlin and David made me put back into the water.

“What’s the biggest fish you’ve ever caught out here?” I asked.

“Black Marlin.”

“Is that what you were named for?”

“No. Named after an old film. Finding Nemo. My mother wanted me to be a good father.”

“Do you have any kids?”

“No. My husband died a few years after we were married. We never got around to it.”

As a journalist it is imperative you steel yourself against questions with uncomfortable answers, but this is something I have never been able to do. Not because of the discomfort but because of a deep well of empathy that has pained me since I was a child. The loss of Marlin’s husband burrowed deep into my chest despite never knowing him, despite only knowing Marlin for the hour we’d been aboard this little dinghy. It was clear that his grief was what had driven Marlin to Prata Neptunia even if I was unaware of the exact circumstances that led him here. Too chastened by his last answer, I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

Instead, I let Marlin teach me how to throw a cast net. Or, well, he tried. But whatever embarrassment I felt over my incompetence with the intricacies of when to let go of the line was quelled by the booming laughter Marlin let out every time I almost spun myself over the side of the boat.

We returned to Neptunia with the high noon sun beating down on the backs of our necks, all of us salted like an over seasoned cod from the chippy by sweat and seawater alike. I was to help Marlin unload our catch, and he was to teach me how to prep the fish. I felt fairly confident that this was something I could do without humiliating myself as my food preparation and nutrition teacher in high school had refused to let us cop out of our fish filleting tutorial by buying one with its guts already removed. So, whatever face I’d lost with the cast net, I’d hopefully regain in the kitchen with Marlin.

This was not to be, however. Arms laden with fish, waddling towards the communal hall, someone in a full wetsuit came sprinting past us. I only narrowly avoided taking them out because of David’s arm shooting out to stop me.

“New patient?” he shouted after the figure.

“Sally brought a friend in,” they replied.

“Sorry, Marlin. Brooke will have to help you out later.” David took the bucket of fish from my arms and set it down on the ground—it still feels strange referring to inflated plastic as ground but I’m at a loss as to what else to call it. “She should see this.”

“No worry.” Marlin shrugged, shifting his bucket to one arm and picking mine up as if it weighed no more than a football. “I’ll be faster alone.”

We headed in the direction of the phytoplankton farm but overshot it by at least three personal pods. Here, another dock-like structure waited with two jetties that were about ten feet apart. Something was bobbing in the water between them, four people gathered around it; Dr Akau, Blue, one of the harvesters I hadn’t got the name of yesterday and the wetsuit. As she pulled her hair back into a ponytail, I recognised her and almost passed out from the shock.

Alandra Pascoal.

A marine veterinarian who I’d been following since way before the IOC had even been announced. A Brazilian woman who had once given a lecture on her experience of leatherback turtle hatchings at my local university that I’d begged—see: annoyed—my parents to take me to. I’d been the youngest one there by at least a decade. Too nervous to ask a question during the Q&A portion of the evening.

Later, I’d come to realise this was probably because I was hopelessly infatuated with Dr Pascoal, but that would not dawn on me for another five years yet when I’d watch a documentary where she stripped down to her underwear mid interview to dive into the water and save a drowning kittiwake.

Now, at least, she had a wetsuit on.

“Bora! Bora!” she yelled at us, waving us over.

I hurried over to Blue’s side, falling to my knees beside them, and my breath caught in my throat.

A green turtle.

The biggest I’d ever seen. Of course, I’d never actually seen one with my own eyes, but I was certain she must have been one of the biggest for next to her was a smaller turtle. Not by much, still bigger than I could believe, but just that little bit smaller. And all twisted up in a plastic net. Not the kind used for fishing, but the red bag your oranges came in from the supermarket. Her head had gone through the hole someone had torn in it, and her beak had gotten caught in the tight criss-cross of the mesh, but it was the metal pinch clip digging into her neck that was the issue. The water was slowly bleeding crimson before our very eyes, and the turtle kept falling below the water.

Alandra eased herself into the water, shooing Sally away gently, and slid a sheet of rubber under the tangled turtle. She passed the straps to the four of us on the jetties, and we heaved her up with all of our might to provide a steady platform for Alandra to work on the turtle. She grabbed a scalpel from the buoyancy belt around her waist and got to work cutting through the plastic inch by delicate inch, freeing first the turtle’s mouth, then its neck. I’m not entirely sure what she did to the wound on the turtle’s neck, Alandra’s back blocked my view, and I was too tongue tied to ask after the fact. I can only assume she stitched it up or disinfected it or both—medicine has never been my strong suit.

The whole thing took under ten minutes, but my arms were trembling with the exertion by the end of it. Turtles are heavier than they fucking look. I had to grit my teeth about two minutes into holding onto those straps with an iron grip. It didn’t help that a wet plastic jetty doesn’t provide much traction with which to anchor yourself. I was lucky I didn’t slip into the water, taking Blue and the turtle with me.

Not sure my already fragile ego would have survived that in front of Dr Pascoal.

Eventually, my aching arms were spared. Alandra gave us the signal, and we lowered the turtle back into the water slowly, slowly. It dove under the waves almost instantly and disappeared from view, but Sally stuck around. She bumped her big, leathery head into Alandra’s hip. And, absently, Alandra petted Sally’s shell.

“Good job, anjo,” she cooed.

Though I hadn’t quite grown out of my hopeless crush on Dr Pascoal, I had never once wavered in my crippling love for these gentle, armoured giants of the deep. Sea turtles had been my favourite animal since it occurred to me to have favourite things. I couldn’t tell you how many turtle plushies I’d collected over my lifetime. Many of them remained in my parents’ house. An army of green flippers at the ready. In my pod aboard the IOC was my oldest turtle plush. I could not be parted from it for a single night.

Turtles occupied a good sixty per cent of my heart, being conservative, and suddenly for the first time in my life there was one right in front of me. A turtle that should have been solitary but had saved another turtle and was now asking for affection from a human saviour. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t to miss a second. Which is why I didn’t notice Blue’s eyes on me until they were opening their mouth.

“Alandra, could Brooke say hello to Sally?” they asked.

The world stopped spinning.

“Of course,” Dr Pascoal said. She met my eyes for the first time, and I thank Poseidon that I was too taken aback by Sally to pass out under Alandra’s attention. “Get in the water. Be calm. She will come to you.”

My voice had fled.

Blue nudged me, and I turned to them, mouth agape. They gave me an encouraging nod, and I swallowed the lump in my throat before slipping into the water. So close to a turtle, so overflowing with awe, the cold of the ocean did not touch me in any way that mattered.

I treaded water for a long moment, almost holding my breath in fear of being rejected by the love of my childhood. Alandra stopped petting Sally, and the turtle, fed up of being ignored, drifted over to me. This time, I did hold my breath. Sally pressed her beak into my arm and looked up at me with her big, sad eyes.

To me, turtles were the elephants of the water. Not for the size, even despite all my earlier musings, but for the eyes. There is something so human to their eyes. Like they understand much more than they should. And feel more than we could ever imagine. Like they know that there’s only one place in the world where they can come to be freed of a plastic coffin.

I set my hand on her shell, and my eyes prickled with tears. It was slick and unyielding under my palm, ridged and coated in a slimy algae. Though I had never been religious, nor of any inclination that any life on our planet had been created by someone with specific ideas in their mind, I could not help but think that this shell gave the impression that someone had designed it so carefully to protect these great beasts from the dangers we might impose on them with our apathy.

Sally slapped her fin into my upturned palm, the hand I was using to help keep myself afloat, and I could no longer hold my tears at bay. I swiped my thumb over her leathery fin achingly gently. I put all the apology I could into the action.

“Sally is a friend,” Alandra murmured. “She’s been visiting us since IOC launched. Had a fishing hook in her fin here.” She pointed to a small pockmark on the fin that Sally had placed in my hand. “She’s showing you because she trusts you. Must have a good heart.”

It was in that moment I wondered for the first time if I’d be able to hand over my recordings to the CIA. Consequences be damned, Prata Neptunia had to exist. If only for Sally. And for Marlin who never got a chance to find his son. And for every other sad-eyed creature in need of a tender, loving touch.

“The ocean is perfectly capable of healing itself just so long as we step up to save it,” Alandra said. “We take out the fishhook, the nets, the trawlers. They,” she gestured at the expanse of the ocean ahead of us, “take care of the rest.”

The people of Prata Neptunia were considered terrorists on land. In the ocean, they were superheroes.

When Sally had finally had her fill of human affection, David escorted me to the kitchen to reconvene with Marlin.

“Have you watched any documentaries from the start of this century?” he asked over the squeak of plastic and rubber beneath our feet.

“A lot of them. Most of them probably. Why?”

“You may have noticed that many of them used the same excuse when criticised for doing nothing in the face of tragedy. ‘We must let nature take its course without human interference’.” He sighed. It was a world-weary sound. The kind of noise Atlas might have made. “That may have been a valid excuse to them way back when, but now. Now, it’s an argument even the sleaziest of lawyers couldn’t uphold in court. With so much human interference in the negative, to interfere in the positive only restores the balance of the world. Nothing we do here could ever be enough to heal the world completely, but as Alandra said, nature is perfectly able of doing that itself. We’re just giving them the tools to do so.”

DAY THREE

“Knock knock!” Blue pushed into my pod before I had chance to answer.

“I’m not decent,” I deadpanned, fully dressed at my desk.

“I’ll say.” Blue wrinkled their nose at me. “Here.” They tossed me a wetsuit. “That should fit you. Put it on and meet me at the docks. ASAP!”

They left my room in a whirlwind of excited energy, and I smothered a smile even with the prospect of wrestling myself into a wetsuit looming over head.

(It was not an elegant process.)

Twenty-seven minutes later, Blue was bullying me onto a boat for my second excursion. This was not a dinghy, but an electric bowrider built for distance sailing.

“Where are we going?” I yelled over the roar of the engine and the wind in my ears.

Blue tossed me a pair of diving goggles when they saw me squinting against the sun and sea spray, but I slapped my sunglasses on instead.

“Jarvis Island!”

I didn’t know much of Jarvis Island only that it wasn’t an island anymore. With rising sea levels, it had been swallowed up completely by 2048. But before that it had been a National Wildlife Refuge after its evacuation during World War II.

I was glad Blue and I had had the opportunity to catch up during the harvest because the motor of our boat left little room for conversation. But it did give me the opportunity to take in the wildlife. The scenery, as magnificent as it was, left little to be described.

Dark blue waves rolling into bright blue sky. Glittering water and drifting clouds. The shadows of migratory birds against the sky and the flashes of fish beneath the water. I was hypnotised. Enchanted so thoroughly that the engine stopping startled me half out of my skin.

When I tore my eyes away from the seabird circling overhead, Blue was fully decked out in wetsuit, diving flippers, goggles and snorkel. I’d seen them in full thermals in the arctic, cargo shorts and a middle-class-dad-on-holiday Hawaiian shirt and even a rhino onesie, but this was somehow the most ridiculous they’d ever looked. The only reason I didn’t laugh was because they were tossing me my own pair of flippers and a snorkel.

“Hope you can hold your breath.” They winked at me before throwing themself over the side of the boat.

I hurried into my flippers, slapped on my goggles and dove after them.

With my Neptunian baptism already under my belt, I knew what to expect from the water this time. And it was much more temperate around Jarvis Island that it had been at the IOC, but still. Something about being unmoored in the middle of such vast waters made the shock of it feel much colder than it was. I burst back up with a gasp, and Blue met me with a proud grin.

“Ever seen a coral reef up close?”

Before I could think better of it, my lips parted. Immediately an entire ocean of saltwater flooded into my mouth and left me spluttering against the tang of it. My eyes were watering, and it wasn’t the sting of the salt at the back of my throat.

“You know I haven’t,” I rasped.

“Yeah, I might have pulled some strings.”

They shrugged, a motion so bashful that it caught me off-guard. Blue Campbell was a lot of things, but coy was not one of them.

Blue Campbell was the kind of person who made your dreams come true, who got you a meet and greet with your favourite animal, who took you to the one place on the planet you’d always wanted to go.

(Blue Campbell was the kind of person that made you feel extremely guilty about the recording device digging into your boob.)

I didn’t care which coral reef I saw just so long as I saw one, but even though it’d been on my bucket list for almost two decades, I’d never gotten around to it. I just kind of assumed it’d happen one day. At some point. But Blue Campbell was not one for waiting around. Case in point:

“Race you to the reef!”

They vanished under the water like a dolphin, and, though I knew my swimming prowess was rather inferior to Blue’s, my competitive spirit possessed me to try to keep up. I was winded about fifty feet into the dash, reduced from my admittedly shabby front crawl to a rather pathetic breaststroke slash doggy paddle. Blue was trying and failing not to laugh when I finally coasted to a stop next them.

“No wonder you’ve never seen a reef before.”

“Fuck off.” I pushed them, flailing slightly when I almost went under the water with them.

“Alright, fine then.” Blue raised their eyebrows at me. “You can swim back to Neptunia.”

“No, no, no!” I grabbed onto their arm. “Just show me the reef. Please.” They schooled their features into a mask of dignified indifference. I sighed. “Pretty please with a cherry on top?”

“Aaand?”

“And sprinkles and raspberry syrup and a goddamn flake.”

“Now that’s what I like to hear.” Blue shoved the snorkel into their mouth, mumbled “man, I miss ice cream” around the mouthpiece and ducked down.

I followed suit, losing all my breath even with the snorkel.

A kaleidoscopic city. A marine metropolis. An alien world. I am aware that coral reefs are not a foreign prospect to most. That many used to make pilgrimages to them during the holiday season, but this was before. Before global warming boiled them all to death. Now, all we have is pictures and a few remote reefs that are only maintained by the strict refusal of visitors. And these pictures are marvellous, but I cannot express to you the beauty of the reef right before your eyes. Close enough to touch and overflowing with life.

Reds, blues, yellows. Pinks, oranges, greens. Purple and teal and magenta. Biofluorescent creatures glowing neon in the sunlight as if some giant, omniscient hand came down to highlight their favourite things. Tubes and trees, sponges and stars, discs and diploria. Brains dropped into the ocean and antlers growing from the sand. Everything looked so alien and yet so familiar. Everything could be likened to something. Even if its likeness happened to be the cross-section of a villus cell in the small intestine—or maybe my brain just works weird. And that. All of that. Only the coral.

Clownfish, parrotfish, unicornfish. Yellowtail coris, spotted boxfish, bicolour angelfish. Triton’s trumpet, squat shrimp, ribbon eel. Seahorses and lobsters and clams. Highways teeming with creatures of all shapes and sizes. Bountiful feasts crowded with hungry customers. Natural car washes or deluxe spas run by cleaner wrasses. This was Underwater Uptown bustling with life. Maybe we need to rename the concrete jungle to the concrete reef. No jungle, to me anyway, ever looked quite so human as this.

I couldn’t tell you how long we spent down there, but it wasn’t long enough. Given the opportunity, I’d have grown gills and made a home on an acropora hyacinthus. (Table coral: the perfect bachelorette pad.) However, my unfortunately mammalian body betrayed me. I had to come up for air, and I needed a break from the constant treading of water. My chest was tight, my arms were lead, my legs jelly. Blue took pity on me and made the swim back to the boat, bringing it in a little closer for me without disturbing the reef. They hauled me out of the water and left me to dry out in the sun starfished across the deck.

It was a good fifteen minutes before I found it in myself to sit up. A further four before I realised we were not going back the way we came. And another two to realise Blue was uncharacteristically quiet.

Was I being taken back to land?

I wish I could say this was an outlandish thought, but as I thought it an island jutted up out of the horizon, and Blue killed the engines. Their shoulders slumped over the wheel.

“I’m sorry for this next bit. I didn’t want to do it like this, but I was outvoted.”

My heart seized in my chest.

What had I done of such offense to be dropped off on a random island in a wetsuit and without my belongings? Had the combination of the water and the skintight wetsuit revealed the mic? Was Blue just that good at reading me?

They dropped anchor and sat on the edge of the boat, staring down at me on the deck.

“I wanted to show you the Jarvis reef last, but they wanted your article to have a certain urgency to it. So, here we are. This is Kiribati.” They gestured at the lump of land in front of us. “Or what’s left of it.”

For what had once been one of the smallest countries in the world, this was taking the cake. It looked more sandbank than island. A little like the stereotypical desert island a child would draw with the one palm tree.

“The sea levels rose, the people fled, but the reefs…” Blue clicked their tongue. “They didn’t get the evacuation memo.”

They fell backwards into the water almost reluctantly. I hesitated. Though I had a pretty good idea of what I’d see down there, I knew for certain I was not prepared to see it with my own eyes. Especially not so soon after seeing what a reef should be. But nature, much like art, is there to make us uncomfortable sometimes. To hold up a mirror to humanity and show us the ugly truth of ourselves. So, I slipped into the water.

If the Jarvis reef had been a bustling city, the Kiribati reef was a ghost town. Every colour of the rainbow had crusted over into a deathly white. Like a sheet had been draped over them for Halloween. Or like bones arranged in perfect precision for a museum exhibition.

A mass graveyard.

When we swam deeper, life had returned, but not the right kind. Algae grew everywhere. Only the smallest spots of white peeking out from behind muddy green. It looked like a shipwreck. All recognisable features lost to time and decay. Even the fish floating through there had been drained of life and colour.

It might be easy to think that the algae would be a source of food to the marine life, but unless they could eat it faster than it could grow, the coral would be smothered and die.

I burst above the surface and made for the boat without another word.

DAY THREE

What could I say that could encapsulate the way I was feeling? What could I say that would possibly do the reef any justice? What could I say to make it all better?

Nothing.

As an environmental journalist, my influence is only so much. I may feel deeply, write strongly, act ethically. But I am just one person of many. A cog in the industrial machine. A faulty one perhaps. But a cog nonetheless. I can no more remove myself from the machine—as much as I may want to—than a fish can remove itself from water. We are trapped in our doomed habitats. Heading full speed ahead for disaster.

The only difference?

My kind is the author of their own destruction.

That fish has nothing to do with theirs.

The fish adapts and overcomes. This is all it has ever known. An increasingly unfamiliar and hostile world that it must find its way in. We humans must find a way to adapt and overcome. And though the human race is all about advancement and evolution, we have never been about overcoming. We are creatures of the status quo. Comfortable in our discomfort just so long as it’s familiar. The thought of changing things is unthinkable. An oxymoron.

Everyone wonders what if? No one stops to wonder what if we actually did?

You only have to look at science-fiction to see this trend. Novel after novel of scientific advancement all with specific purposes that correspond to a certain societal issue. Orwell’s 1984 and censorship, control, authoritarianism. Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale and reproductive rights. And forgive me the more juvenile example, Disney-Pixar’s Wall-E and waste management, consumerism, reliance on artificial intelligence. When we pursue new avenues of technology inspired by sci-fi, we forget the messages behind them. Science is worthless without real intent.

As the ever-wise Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park: your scientists were so preoccupied with wondering whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. This lack of consequential consideration has ravaged our planet. Stopping to think if we should is no longer an option. We must simply stop.

Our oceans not only need the break but deserve it. We might think that these nationless waters and their inhabitants are freer than most of us on land. This is not true. Our colonisation of the seas is one of our most brutal and yet one of our least protested. Just because marine life cannot speak for itself does not mean they do not object to what is being done to them. We must be their mouthpieces.

This is not to say we should stop speaking out for the humans institutionally silenced in our world. And it may seem daunting to add yet another fight to our plate. But, simply put, if we do not fight for the water, there will be no human life left to fight for.

How long before our countries start to look like reef ghost towns? Cooked by solar radiation and greenhouses gases.

How many more countries must be swallowed up by rising sea levels? Like Kiribati and Samoa and Fiji.

How can we possibly stop such industrial giants? How can we possibly undo all the damage we have wrought?

The crew of the IOC would soon give me the answer to the first question. As for the latter, well, that would greet me with eight tentacles.

After our trip to the reefs, I was desolate and inconsolable. I locked myself away in my pod and wrote for hours, right through the night and well into the next afternoon. Although, as any writers reading this may know, such a length of writing didn’t reap so many words. At the end of it, I had these two pages and a little more beside that I would later edit out.

In between paragraphs, I would stop to grieve the reefs of Kiribati or drown in my guilt or wait for Ariel and co. to rip me from my room and ship me back to land as my visit drew to a close. Maybe they were giving me privacy to mourn. Maybe I’d earnt their trust. Maybe there were more important things to worry about than a melancholic journalist.

Just after noon, I forced myself out of the comforting darkness of my pod and into the light. The sky had clouded over, looking grey and angry above me, and I couldn’t help thinking that it knew what I knew. After all, it watched the desolation of the water from above every day. It got a bird’s eye view of the chaos we dealt. And those clouds were formed of the very water being so methodically devastated.

It was Dr Akau and Blue who found me glaring glumly up at the sky.

“It’s a difficult thing to experience,” Kaimana said, forgoing trivial greetings for which I was grateful. “To know what we are doing to the world and to see it are two very different things. To see the wreckage in photos and to see it with your own eyes, it is incomparable. To swim in the waters with the little life that remains…”

“It’s enough to radicalise someone,” I finished for her.

It was the only end to that sentence I could think of. Damn whatever conclusions Agent Farlane drew from it.

Blue and Kaimana shared a look that I was not to be let in on.

Dr Akau led me away from Blue, towards one of the outermost laboratories of the IOC.

“When we were branded as a terrorist organisation, I think lots of people assumed we’d given up our research to dedicate ourselves to terror—whatever that may look like. I wouldn’t blame them for thinking that. I mean, what else were they told? The information fed to you out there on land was minimal by design to prevent anyone from forming a real opinion on what we were doing.” As we ducked into the lab, Dr Akau lowered her voice. “Our research never stopped. We just stopped giving it to the world. Not for some ego trip but to protect what we were finding, which is why I ask you not to publish any specifics we show to you in here.”

“You have my word,” I whispered back.

“Then, I will show you our greatest asset.”

In the middle of the laboratory was a gap in the floor about three square feet that looked down into the bottomless ocean. The water was almost entirely pitch black and seemed to have its own gravitational pull. Dr Akau knelt beside it and gestured for me to join her on the opposite side. We were there for a while. Long enough that my knees started to ache with being folded under the rest of my body for so long. But I would have waited forever when the first shadowy tentacle unfurled from the deep.

“This is Liten Kraken, our lead researcher at the IOC.” Dr Akau held out her hand, and the tentacle curled itself around her pinkie. She smiled the way a mother smiles at her baby. “We wouldn’t know half as much as we do if it weren’t for him.”

Tentacle by tentacle, he revealed himself to us. A jet-black octopus with glittering silver spots all over his body that made him look like the night sky.

“Aloha, Liten,” Kaimana murmured. “What have you brought for me today?” With his final two tentacles, Liten placed an amphipod and a rock on the lab floor. “Every specimen we have from the Hadal zone comes from Liten.”

It was then that I noticed how he looked a little like he was melting. Similar to the blobfish, without the immense pressure of the hadopelagic region, Liten lost a lot of his structural integrity.

“Mahalo, sweetheart,” she said, picking the gifts up with her free hand. “Would you grab me a tray?”

I shuffled over to one of the lab tables and retrieved a metal tray into which she placed the specimens. She then plucked a small fish I recognised from my trip with Marlin and David from a nearby bucket. A brightly coloured little thing I hadn’t thought safe for human consumption, but David had told me not to release back into the sea. As Kaimana offered it to Liten, I began to understand why.

“Epipelagic fish are like a delicacy to him. The same way we might go to Asia to sample authentic sushi, he comes up here to get blue and gold snappers.”

Liten sucked the fish down into the water, but I could not make out him eating it in the darkness. And before long, his tentacles were withdrawing back down into the ocean.

Kaimana whispered a goodbye and looked at me for the first time since Liten had appeared.

“He can’t stay up here for very long, and almost everything in the Hadal zone is a scavenger of some sort, so he’s not used to catching his own food. Instead, he struck a deal with us. We’re still not even sure how he found us. Our hypothesis is that his territory was disturbed, possibly by pollution or a predator.”

I could embellish here. Make up some witty remark or astute observation. But in the interest of journalistic integrity, I shan’t lie.

I was fucking speechless.

DAY FOUR

Blue burst into my pod at 5:45 AM Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time. I’d been deep in a dream about a Ratatouille situation where Liten hid inside my wetsuit and helped my diving, so waking in a plastic dome to a harried figure looming over me was a bit disorienting. Blue dropped an armful of clothes onto me.

“Get to the docks in ten minutes.”

They were gone before they’d finished speaking.

I pulled on my clothes as quickly as I could with my still-uneasy legs. Blue had given me my waterproof cargo pants, my sweat-wicking tank and my black waterproof jacket. Whatever we were doing today required me to be protected and discreet. My stomach churned.

At the dock, Blue waved me onto the bowrider they’d taken me to the reef in. It was filled with a handful of vaguely familiar Neptunians, all dressed in the same sleek black outfits I was. Anyone with hair had it either slicked back into a bun or tucked into a beanie. There was a grim determination to the air around that boat. The kind of resolve you can only find in people with recklessly good hearts.

Blue took me to the back of the boat once we’d set off, eyes flickering between mine as if searching for my answer to a question I hadn’t even been asked.

“Ready to find out why Prata Neptunia is classed as a terrorist state?”

I blinked, still half-asleep. I guess terrorism is an early bird’s game. No wonder I’d only made it onto any government watchlists this past year.

“Anything I should know?” I asked, more than a little alarmed.

I’d hoped, however naively, that I’d be excluded from anything that could class as evidence of their terrorism. That they’d hide it from the outsider. Clearly, I’d done too good a job of ingratiating myself.

“Follow my lead, stick close to me, you’ll be alright.” They shot me a salt-speckled grin. “Not like you’re a stranger to a bit of vandalism, right?”

My hand fell to the recording device in my bra. Still there.

“It’s going to be okay.”

Blue took my hand and gave it a squeeze, mistaking my paranoia for anxiety. Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of anxiety too, but it was the thought of Agent Farlane’s chiding eyes haunting me then, not whatever awaited us out there on the water.

“I know, just… What are we actually doing?”

“Got word of a bottom trawler close by.” Blue shook their head. “Have you seen what they do?”

I had. I’d been fourteen when I’d first watched a documentary about the ocean that included the horrors of the bottom trawler fisheries. The image of those fish trying to outrun the weighted nets, the silt dredged up and habitats destroyed, the panic of the creatures caught against the wire. I’d cried so much I gave myself a headache.

Imagine, if you will, going for a walk with a friend through a beautiful field of wildflowers. Catching up on what happened at work and who you saw at the shops. Stopping to smell the primroses. A relaxing day at the end of a busy week.

Then, imagine a line of military tanks appearing over the horizon, plundering over the field towards you at a blistering place. Crushing every flower, snail, bunny under its path until finally they reach you and your friend. The tanks are moving at such a pace that you get caught against their fronts like bugs on the windshield of a car. You do not know what will happen to you when the tanks finally stop. You only know that it will not be good. Now, imagine that happening all across the globe multiple times a day. All the fields ruined. All the wildlife killed. All the people trapped.

(It happens in some places. This thought exercises is not as hypothetical as it should be.)

This is the trawling industry.

Suddenly, Agent Farlane’s eyes vanished from my mind. He didn’t scare me half as much as these bottom-feeding bottom trawlers scared their prey. And, really, what was a bit of light terrorism on the high seas?

When we came within range of the trawler, I saw real terrorism. No amount of documentaries can prepare you for how gargantuan those beasts are. Forget David and Goliath. In our little motorboat, we were the tooth of the t-rex, the flea on the elephant’s back, the krill in the whale’s mouth. Never had I been so glad for my sweat-wicking tank.

Four hundred and fifty feet long, roughly a thirty-four-story building on the ocean. A thirty-four-story fish factory. One and a half football fields of fish stunning, killing, cleaning, filleting, freezing. A gargantuan hunk of rusted metal pumping out smoke into the sky and waste into the sea. The ocean’s version of those grey-brown nuclear plant chimneys: an environmental eyesore, polluting the view as well as the world. A giant mast to support the net, sticking out sideways at least fifty feet either side.

What the fuck were seven people on a bowrider going to do to this?

“Right.” Blue stood up and raised their voice to be heard over mini motor and sailing factory alike. “We go in, we cut the nets, we get back out. You know the drill. No messing around. Do it well and do it fast.” Their eyes found me. “And look out for Brooke.”

There were murmurs of assent and shifty glances sent my way and then we were upon the trawler, bouncing violently on its wake. Seasickness was never anything I had to worry about, but it found me that day. I had to white knuckle the boat railing just to stop myself hurling into the water. The thick, cloying scent of smoke and fish guts wasn’t much help.

As we pulled up alongside the boat, the noise of the net hoists whirring added itself to the cacophonous chorus. Looking up, the net crisscrossed against the bright blue sky like prison bars, I felt as if I was getting an insight into my future.

“Shit, let’s go!” Blue shouted.

I will be keeping all of the participants of this event anonymous apart from Blue and myself, so I will be referring to them by names of sharks because I think that’s cool.

Hammerhead, a dark-skinned woman with cropped hair and onyx stretcher tunnel earrings, pulled out a length of cord with a grappling hook tied to the end. People stepped back to give her room to swing it around a few times before she hurled it up at the beam looming over us. With a neat little ting! the hook bounced off the metal and came hurtling back down towards us. It landed with a splash in the water just to our left.

“Fuck,” Hammerhead hissed.

“Hurry up, hurry up!” This was Thresher, a wiry girl with a platinum blonde pixie cut and big cartoonish eyes.

“Do you want to do it?”

Hammerhead reeled the hook back in and tried again. The second throw was much better than the first. A decent length of rope wrapping itself around the beam before the hook lodged itself in a groove on the metal. Hammerhead gave it three solid tugs before stepping aside for Shortfin and Mako.

Shortfin was tiny, four foot two at the absolute max but her biceps were bigger than mine—not that there’s much competition there anyway. Mako was only slightly taller, couldn’t have been five feet, and had the kind of stocky build that came from hard work. Shortfin hauled herself up the rope first, a rope ladder strapped to her back, Mako following shortly after. They scampered up the ropes as if it was second nature and inch wormed their way across the beam. They were barely halfway across when the fishermen started shouting.

Down by the roaring engines, we couldn’t make out any words, just raised voices. But Shortfin and Mako didn’t stop their tightrope walk. Nor did the nets stop their slow crawl off the deck and out to sea.

Thresher scooped up a rucksack from under the boat’s bench and rifled around in it for a few moments before zipping it back up and slinging it over her shoulder. She buckled it around her chest and waist and tilted her head back to watch Shortfin and Mako begin their descent to deck. Mako stopped halfway, hunkering down in a little square of metal that kept him steady, and pulled out a gun, shouting something at the fishermen as Shortfin disappeared from view.

My heart was in my throat. As if my very own internal Liten had plucked it from my chest and brought it up, up, up.

A rope ladder flung itself over the side of the ship and billowed down to us like Rapunzel’s hair. Thresher was on it before it had stopped bouncing around, possibly before Shortfin had even finished tying the knots. Hammerhead was close on her heels, a backpack of their own on their shoulders.

“I’ll keep her steady,” Cookiecutter said from the bowrider’s controls. He reminded me a little of Marlin. The same warmth and sadness in his eyes, but he was much younger and fair-skinned and rougher around the edges.

“You ready?” Blue asked me. I must have hesitated for a second too long because they were glancing at Cookiecutter. “You can stay on the boat if you want.”

“No.” I shook my head vehemently. Bad idea. My nausea returned with a vengeance, bile burning at the back of my tongue. “I’m coming.”

“Okay.” Blue sighed, gave me one last searching look and leapt onto the ladder.

I followed close behind, always leaving a rung between us so Blue’s feet didn’t catch me in the chin as we climbed.

When I finally tumbled over the trawler’s railing, I couldn’t figure out what to look at first. Shortfin had joined Mako on the mast with a gun of her own, the two of them like our guardian eagles, beady eyes trained on the frozen fishermen, ready to swoop. Hammerhead and Thresher were working on the far cable with a motorised cable cutter. The nets had paused in their ascent, great industrial butterfly wings for the trawler.

Blue dragged me over to the closest cable and pulled out our very own cable cutter. I held it steady whilst they got to work on sawing through the braided metal, millimetre by agonising millimetre.

The ship lurched to the left as Hammerhead and Thresher’s wire gave way. The net collapsed back onto the deck with a groan, and Shortfin scampered across the beam to attach something to the winch.

“Okay, Brooke, let go,” Blue gritted out.

I dropped the wire like it had burnt me. A millisecond later and it might have as the cable snapped, hissing up into the air and through the winch. Our net fell over one or two of the fishermen who had been rushing to catch Shortfin and Mako when they’d pulled their guns. The sight of them writhing in the nets was immensely satisfying to me. A taste of their own medicine. I had to swallow a laugh. Thresher didn’t bother, cackling so hard she bent double at the waist.

“Back down we go,” Blue sing-songed, needling me over to the rope ladder.

I swung one leg over the railing, looked down at the frothing seas below me and was hit by a wave of vertigo so crippling that Blue had to grab my arm to keep me from falling into the wake and getting sucked under the water never to resurface.

“Hey.” Blue grabbed my face. “Just take it one rung at a time, babbling Brooke.”

I nodded, took a deep breath and got myself onto the ladder, descending rung by rung. Around halfway down those goddamn rungs had grown slick from the sea spray, and I gave up on them the third time my grip slipped. I used the rough rope of the frame for handholds instead and made it into the boat.

“Welcome to the Prata Pirates,” Cookiecutter said, throwing a grin over his shoulder.

I threw up.

Blue dropped down to the deck just as I was wiping my mouth on the back of my hand and rinsing it off in the ocean. They shot me an apologetic look, wrinkling their nose.

“Forgot about your heights thing.”

I waved them off, finding comfort in looking up at where I’d come from, at what I’d overcome.

Thresher was a quarter of the way down, Shortfin almost at the grappling hook line, and Mako at the top of the mast. Hammerhead was straddling the side of the boat when one of the fishermen hauled her off by her waist.

Thresher was launching herself back up the ladder in an instant, Blue was cursing up a storm, I was rather uselessly gaping like a fish out of water. Mako simply turned around, slipping his gun back into his belt and taking out a red pistol. He shot a flare into the pile of nets, the polyethylene lighting up in a flash, and calmly resumed his climb.

Hammerhead hurled herself down the ladder, and Thresher only started moving again when Hammerhead was out of grabbing range of any handsy fishermen.

Shortfin slipped down the grappling hook line like it was the snake in this game of snakes and ladders, landing on the deck with a huff.

“Not bad, newbie.” She landed a punch to the meat of my arm, and it took everything in me not to wince at the force of it. “Not that you did much really.”

Thresher landed next and held the ladder steady for her partner. As soon as Hammerhead was on deck, Thresher pulled her into a vicious hug that Hammerhead sunk into.

“I’m okay,” she breathed. “I’m alright.”

Mako touched down a moment later. His feet hit the deck, and Cookiecutter hit a U-turn, heading back for Neptunia. Thresher shot Mako a nod of gratitude before bundling her partner in a blanket from under the boat’s bench. Hammerhead rolled her eyes but otherwise took the coddling graciously.

Blue sat down beside me with a sigh.

“You’ve got your thinking face on,” they said.

In truth, I’m not really sure I was thinking anything before they said that. Adrenaline had wiped my mind clean. Barred the door to thoughts of any real consequence. But Blue’s words had the barricade tumbling down and all my thoughts arrived at once.

How much life did we just save? How much life did we condemn? Prata Pirates. It must be easy to put a fire out at sea—surely. Sufficient evidence for my acquittal. Would that be sufficient? Only audio and the majority of the sabotage was silent. What will they do with it? Finally fulfilling my childhood dreams of piracy. The real kind, not the film and TV kind. Will my participation impact my deal with Farlane? I can plea rightful cause and preservation of life, right? Fuck, did I just almost die? No, you’re being dramatic. One slip and I would have drowned. For someone who loves the ocean so much, I’m far too scared of drowning. The height of the fall might have killed me before I hit the water. Captain Birdseye’s Lament.

“Is this what you do every time?” I asked, trying to keep my voice blank. I’m not sure what emotion was shaping my words, only that it wobbled more than I’d like.

“It’s normally a little less… destructive than that.” Blue rolled their bottom lip between their teeth, brow furrowing. “The flares are only for emergency-emergencies like if one of our own is in trouble. All things going well, we cut the nets and jam the equipment to prevent them from trawling. Nobody gets hurt. Not even the fish. It’s not the fishermen’s fault. It’s their bosses who never step foot off land to see what they’re doing to the sea. A little bit of property damage for an entire ecosystem. Ruin their profit margins. Make them think twice about killing so indiscriminately for a dollar and a dime.” Blue met my gaze, and I couldn’t tell if it was ocean or fire in their eyes. “Trawlers are oceanic weapons of mass destruction. We take those weapons, not their lives.”

All those thoughts in my head and the loudest by far: three years studying marine life and conservation, four years of investigative journalism, five years of attending protests—peaceful or otherwise—and I’d done more for the ocean, for the planet, in ten minutes today.

David and Kaimana were waiting for us upon our return. I assumed this was post-mission protocol. A debrief with the senior researchers. However, they took both me and Blue into a nearby pod. Blue made sense. Maybe I did too. Maybe they wanted an outsider’s perspective on it all. Or maybe it was a test, and they’d suspected my presence here all along. I wish the latter had have been irrational, but as they took Blue into the office and made me wait outside, it seemed the likeliest of all the explanations. And by the time Blue emerged, I’d managed to convince myself of my fate; an unmotorised dinghy set adrift in the Pacific.

“Your turn,” Blue said, holding the door open for me. There was a twinkle in their pupils that I liked to think wouldn’t be there if I was being sentenced to a likely death.

I ducked into the room with nerves fizzing behind my sternum. This must have been their office once upon a time. The two plastic desks that had been pushed together to create one, the shelves filled with books on marine biology and oceanography, the filing cabinets lining the walls, the papers strewn over every surface. A pile of waterproof laptops and high-tech comms teetered in the corner, long abandoned to avoid detection. The only digitality that remained in that room was an old ham radio and a live map screen on the wall that showed the placement of industrial fishing vessels on the seas.

David was perched on the desk, and he offered me a smile when he noticed me lingering in the doorway. Kaimana was sat on one of the inflatable cubes that constituted a chair on the IOC, and she gestured to the free one beside her. I took my seat, swallowing thickly.

“I won’t embellish,” she began. Dr Akau had naturally friendly eyes, but the rest of her face was unreadable in the dim light of that pod-office. “Today was a test.” Panic seized me by the throat, the mic in my bra burning against the skin of my chest. “We wanted to see how you’d react to the darker side of what we do here.”

“And?” I croaked. My gaze bounced between them, trying to find something, anything. But David was just as impenetrable as Kaimana.

“And…” He cocked his head to the side, shrugged, smiled. “You passed. Not with flying colours. The vomiting definitely knocks you down a grade or two. But you passed.”

The breath I let out made me feel like little Liten up top, deflating without the pressure of the Hadal zone pressing down on him.

“What, um, what was the test for? Can I ask?”

“Your few days with us have shown promise.” Kaimana smiled. “Your spirit, your values, your willingness to contribute and get stuck in. Most certainly, your obvious love for the animals you have met.”

“We think you’d be a good fit,” David finished.

“A good fit for…?”

“For Prata Neptunia.”

I blinked.

“You… you want me to stay?”

“We’re offering you the opportunity to stay if you so wish,” Dr Akau clarified. “You’d still get to publish your piece. Even continue to document your stay with us here, but your life as you know it would be over.”

“And unfortunately, for the security of Neptunia, you wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to anyone on land.” The twist of David’s mouth was sincerely apologetic. “We’d take you to a remote location with a Wi-Fi connection where you would publish the piece and leave your laptop—”

“You’d be able to bring your hard drive though. We’re not monsters,” Kaimana added.

I huffed a half-hysterical laugh. Guilt flooded through me. They were allowing me special privileges whilst my boobs hid my betrayal.

“But your article would be the only communication you’d have with the people you care about.” David sighed. “It’s a big decision not to be made lightly, so we’re not asking for an answer now. You’ll have until tomorrow evening to make your choice and let us know.”

“We’d love to give you more time, but the longer your laptop stays here, the more danger it poses to our operation. I hope you understand.”

“I-I do.” I floundered for any better words. For something more profound than a stammered I do. “I—this is—I can’t believe—thank you for—” I cut myself off with a sigh. “I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all we ask.”

DAY FIVE

Safe to say, I did not get much sleep that night.

After a particularly raucous dinner in which Hammerhead delighted in reenacting her near-miss for us all, I retired to my pod early to write up our swashbuckling jaunt. With the help of the audio I extracted from my government-issued tape recorder, it barely took me two hours to get the whole thing down. Then I was free to think about Doctors Askwith and Akau’s offer.

Being of sound mind and a fully-fledged adult, naturally I made a pros and cons list that I will insert below.

PROS: really fucking cool, surrounded by my heroes, TURTLES!!!, octopi helpers, saving the ocean, avoiding prosecution.

CONS: never seeing family/friends again, my shitty sea legs, DANGEROUS!!!, become legally classified as a terrorist—yikes.

It is not very comprehensive, nor very eloquent, nor all that mature, but a decision like this is based on emotion just as much as it is logic. So, trust the process.

After that, I decided I needed to sleep on it, although maybe this was more the adrenaline crash than me. But the land of dreams seemed as far from me as dry land. Instead, my brain ran wild with fantasies of becoming Dr Akau’s best friend, and Dr Pascoal’s protégé. Of becoming a pirate queen of the Pacific at Blue’s side. Of saving the world.

I’d reverted so far back into my childhood that I was dreaming of being Aquaman again.

And then of course, to bring myself back down to earth—or ocean—I thought of Agent Farlane. Of the deal we’d made. Of what might be waiting for me back home. The chances he backed on our deal were not zero. I was a pawn in a government game. I had no idea what would happen when I handed over the recording device. For all I knew, he’d slap a handcuff on me the moment he took it from me. And even if he didn’t arrest me then and there, even if I got away with aiding and abetting a terrorist act, what would happen when I published such an overwhelmingly positive article about the IOC?

Surely, that would not go unpunished.

But my answer did not find me until midafternoon the next day.

After an uneasy sleep and a slow morning, Blue came to take me on a walk around the parts of Prata Neptunia I hadn’t seen. They took me first to their room which was not dissimilar to my own, only differentiated really by the clothes all over the floor and their watercolours on the walls.

Blue was a brilliant artist. I’d known this since I’d seen them sketching fellow protesters at an anti-fracking rally. They’d drawn me in five minutes on a coffee cup with a biro that was running out of ink, and it remains to this day my favourite picture of myself to exist anywhere on the planet. In fact, it is the picture attached to my bio on this very website.

But during their sketch, they had told me their true talent lay with watercolours. I’d seen one or two of their paintings over the years, and they’d been gorgeous. A lighthouse here and a stone ruin there. Impressive, of course. Beautiful for certain. But the watercolours wallpapering her pod were something else entirely. There were a few animals. Sally featured in a handful of paintings. There were some of the reefs we’d visited, both alive and dead. But most of them were simply the sea and sky as seen from Neptunia. The same view in at least a hundred different pictures, but each so vibrantly their own that they could have been compiled in a flipbook that captured the true nature of the ocean.

I tried to express my awe to them in that moment, but as you may have noticed, I am not the best at verbalising my emotions. My form is the written word, so I hope these paragraphs waxing poetic about your artistic abilities suffice, Blue!

It was Cookiecutter who came to fetch us, shepherding us over to the starboard side of the colony where at least half of the crew had gathered. Blue elbowed their way to the front, dragging me behind them, and we settled in to watch the horizon. Truth be told, I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking at in that moment. All I saw were the dark blue waters crawling over each other until a burst of spray climbed straight up into the air.

I gasped, grabbing Blue’s hand to steady myself as a grey-blue island rose from the ocean. No, not an island. A blue whale. A beautiful blue whale cresting just twenty feet away from me. It had to be a sign.

This was the first entry on my bucket list, written in the wobbly handwriting of an overenthusiastic five-year-old. I’d never managed to cross it off and not for lack of trying. I’d been on at least seven whale cruises, little day trip boats that built their craft around spotting whales, and they had always eluded me. Every whale-sighting company must have had me blacklisted from their booking systems as a jinx of some sorts. And now, here one was, rolling in the water and spraying and slapping its tail in greeting.

“This is Martha,” Blue whispered.

I didn’t need any more than that. Anyone who was following the IOC as closely as I had been knew about Martha. The blue whale calf that had come to the colony when it choked on a plastic bag. Dr Pascoal had fished it out of its mouth, and the whale had visited them every year since to say thank you.

This was not a visit of gratitude, however. Not entirely anyway. For a second, smaller grey-blue island rose from the water. A calf playing with her mother. A mother playing with her calf. Martha would submerge herself and then reappear a few feet from where she’d been, and the calf would roll in sheer delight. A game of peekaboo.

Fucking peekaboo!

The image of it blurred in front of me as my eyes stung with tears.

Mum, Dad, I want you to recall the way you felt when you held me for the first time. The joy, the awe, the fear, the responsibility. Everything else. I’ve never had kids of my own, nor do I wish to as you well know, but I imagine it must have been a similar feeling to what filled me at the sight of those whales. I tell you this in the hopes that it helps you understand why I made the choice that I made. Maybe one day you’ll be able to forgive me for it.

I stayed at the edge of Neptunia long after the whales had departed. I stayed there so long even Blue left me there, realising I needed time to process what I’d seen. I stayed there until darkness fell, and then I made my way to the docks. The bowrider was tethered to the closest jetty, and I hopped into it, struggling out of my bra under my shirt.

(At least there were no walls to bash my elbows into here.)

It took a good few minutes to get it off, but the recording device was simple to fish out of the lining. Simpler to crush between the deck and the rubber soles of my aqua socks.

How could I go back to my normal life after seeing what I’d seen? How could I go back to land knowing what I knew? How could I live with myself if I continued this fight from behind a keyboard rather than on the front lines?

The ocean needs every soldier it can get. I am not the first to volunteer, nor will I be the last, but I am another crucial part of its saving.

So are you.

[Issue 2026.75]

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