Less than a decade later, people realized too late that the oceans were, for lack of a better term, absolutely fucked. Acidification and heating of the oceans completely changed the biosphere, and killed off most non-environmentally-resistant life within the oceans. The sea that we took for granted was, for all intents and purposes, a corpse graveyard.
Guess that’s why the Antithesis decided to use it as an all you can eat buffet.”
- Titanbreak, 2050
“Are you sure it’s ok to dive down here? I mean, considering the amount of urchins that are down there, you’d stab your foot,” Nate asked. He was always a stickler for safety, even if it often was warranted.
“Nate, if there were urchins down here, we’d have WagyuniCorp on our asses faster than you can say umami. It’s just a rumor you heard to keep people from coming out here,” I stated matter-of-factly, finishing my checks on my gear.
“Still….”
“Relax, Nate. I’ve done this before. A couple times. Not here, of course, but it should count for at least something.” I waved him off with a bit of a goofy grin and a half-hearted laugh before pulling my diving mask over my face, only leaving my mouth free for the time to continue to banter.
Nate rolled his eyes, tapping his foot with a little annoyance. “Macy, are you sure you’re not a Samurai? You’re more wistful and eccentric than usual today.”
“I assure you, I am not. Though, you’re not too far off on the wistfulness,” I said, my expression betraying my inner thoughts. Those thoughts, of course, were thoughts of swimming around in the water like I belonged there. I had been diving for a little over a year after my enthusiasm of being right next to the ocean for most of my life up to this point, about 24 years, finally caught up to me.
It was a blast.
I hadn’t tried before recently because one, being a kid sucks and you don’t have the credits to back up your dreams, and two, when you’re an adult, you actually have to work to get said credits to follow your hobbies. Considering that it took me taking a fourteen-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week job for the last four years at a local coffee shop to get this far…
Safe to say I’m just glad that I can probably make a lot more money diving places people really don’t want to go. That is, if people were willing to pay.
That’s the funny part, isn’t it? For all of the talk people have about exploration, we still hadn’t explored every inch of the sea. For the most part, what was good about the sea, the flora and fauna, was mostly wiped out by either climate change or the god damned Antithesis. So, the biggest draw of the sea? Gone. Or maybe in a tank in some corpo’s secret evil lair. Probably the latter.
Bleh. Thinking about that is always sobering, and depressing.
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“Any case, keep me posted through your augs if you need me to do something to help,” Nate huffed, and then looked up thoughtfully, and started to faux-count things in his head on his fingers. “Like writing your will on the spot if needed.”
“Dark, but not unwarranted,” I said, fully pulling my mask over my mouth, leaving my speech muffled. “I won’t try to go too deep today, I still need to scope out around this spot.”
He shook his head with begrudging acceptance, knowing fully well he wasn’t going to be able to drag me back to shore this close to the dive. “Good luck, Mako.”
“Still a good nickname, and still not a Samurai.” I laughed and then, with a small leap, I jumped from the dock into a small forgotten harbor of Seattle with a splash, the sound of the impact muting as I dropped beneath the water’s surface. Immediately, my eye augs began to adjust to the underwater space, a small software feature that was part of the whole purchase of my gear for diving that had paid off in spades.
Embracing the partial weightlessness of being underwater, I laid back slightly, breathing deeply through my mask and rebreather. It was good to be back in the water. A day off work diving, this was truly the life. The water left me feeling like I was floating in space, yet my buoyancy pulling me towards the surface without my interference kept me just tethered enough myself that I didn’t feel completely disconnected. I watched the ripples from my drop pulse across the surface of the water above me, drawing me into a meditative trance. I closed my eyes and let myself drown in that feeling radiating through me.
Pure unadulterated bliss. Unbound by life. Unbound by the corps. Unbound by parents. Unbound by direction. I could float anywhere; up, down, left, right, all around. I could do a full flip and it would be child’s play! That is freedom. It’s more than a feeling of freedom, it’s something more than that. Something more than words can describe. It feels more than space, more than time. And yet…time still exists, so I needed to get to swimming.
I finally righted myself, pulling myself from that sense of transcendent bliss, and began to swim forward. About ten minutes in…or more, time is an illusion anyways, I checked the upper right of my diving mask’s HUD to check and see if Nate’s feed was online. It wasn’t yet. Hmm…
I paused my swimming to message him.
“[Nate? Are you watching?]”
A moment passed before a response came through.
“[Yeah, sorry, just a little spacey right now. You ever get the feeling that something is off?]”
I paused. Nate usually had good instincts for these kinds of things. We had a day once where we were coming back from a club on campus during college when it was really dark, and someone came up to us, seeing we were “together”. They asked if we wanted to go with them to a party. I didn’t know how to say no to the guy, but Nate kindly declined for both of us. We later learned that the party that we missed was actually a corpo death game that was being livestreamed where they got random college kids to do horrible things with the promise of fully paid tuition. Genuinely terrifying shit. So, when he says something’s off, I don’t take chances.
“[In what way?]” I typed back, slowing myself to a standstill.
“[Ever think that something could go both very good and very bad at the same time?]”
“[Nate, respectfully, that is the most ominous shit you’ve ever said. And you’ve said a LOT of ominous shit.]”
“[Guilty as charged, but the point still stands. Just…be ready.]”
Fuck.
Well, at least I have the small harpoon pistol on the off-chance something predatory that can survive in the ocean comes after me. Who are we kidding, it'll probably be Antithesis.
Through the murky water, a distorted…yet terrifyingly familiar wail of a siren began to cry out. The incursion siren. And then a message on my augs.
Incursion Detected. Please move quickly to your local shelter.
Double fuck. Why do I jinx myself like this?