Bruce

She had been staring at her image for minutes now, leering at her body in anger. She was so pale, her scales that had been a beautiful striking blue dimming from malnutrition, now almost completely gray. She glanced at her fins in disgust, ashamed at the state of her appendages. Atrophy had claimed a lot of her ability to twist and turn, had she possessed a full range of motion, she would’ve bitten off the hard plastic ring attached to her left rear fin, or maybe just the fin itself. The translucent nature of the strange wall she was viewing her reflection on caused her likeness to appear rippled and ethereal, like glowing troupes of shrimp that would gather together in attempts to look like larger predators. She would've thought her reflection’s ghost-like quality was an appropriate representation for how she felt, except ghosts looked like spectral versions of things that died, and she barely even recognized what she had become.

“Mom, I want to see Bruce!” Hearing that word shook her from her moments of dissassotion. She had come to realize that, that is what she was; a ‘Bruce.’ Sometimes she worried that she’d lose herself completely. That, worse than her previous despair, the sheer boredom of her circumstances would eat away at her mind the way it had deteriorated her body, and leave nothing behind. In that way, hearing herself being called at with such an ugly sound kept her alive. If there was anything that kept her angry enough to retain some semblance of sanity, it was hearing that name.

"He's just… floating there, mama make it move!" The other sounds the child made meant nothing but annoyance to her. Though her hearing was excellent, her species could perceive the slightest electromagnetic waves and, using this ability in conjunction with manipulating their own electromagnetic field, had developed an extremely rich method of communication. It was much better suited to conveying complex notions and much less disruptive for neighboring fish that liked the quiet.

"Bruce! Over here sharky!" The child slammed it's palms against the enclosure and whined. If it could read her electrical impulses the child would devote the rest of its life to thanking the makers of the clear hard rock that prevented her from escaping. Most animals would keep their young far away from a predator like her, but that was the privilege of man, near complete apathy to the conditions that the planet's other occupants existed in. She turned away from the barrier and swam toward the large rocky structure that marked the center of her living space, a space filled with artificial coral and was devoid of any other organisms. The entire installation was no more than 100 lengths of her body across, and no part of it was deep enough to be away from the bright lights that flooded every corner of her manufactured surroundings. She hadn’t fully appreciated having hundreds of thousands of miles of ocean to explore, along with it’s underwater caves and caverns. An ocean teaming with life and interactions.

She didn’t know if her yearnings helped to preserve what little self she had left, or whether the contrast of her previous life and her current one just caused her to further succumb to misery. She fought back against the thought that she’d never be able to hunt again, never taste a fresh kill again. The food they would throw into her prison consisted entirely of dead fish, no seagrass, no kelp, no posidonia, just fish heads, fins, and mashed up fish guts. She also worried that more of her kind could, or already had, ended up in the same situation she found herself begrudgingly becoming more accustomed too.

They had caught her as she was sleeping. She had been careful for so long, stayed so far away, and in truth it wasn’t her error that led to her capture. The humans had been encroaching on her world since they had created their giant wooden sea vessels, and if her kind would have foreseen just how catastrophic the effects of those first voyages would be, they would’ve done everything they could to keep the curious land dolphins from ever traversing the seas. It had started innocently at first, it seemed like it could be beneficial even, the humans would throw bodies over there wooden travel aids, good food for the oceans they travelled in. Sometimes the entirety of their metal and oak monstrosities would sink into the oceans, providing the life near where it’s remains would settle with hiding spots and shelter, sometimes accompanied by a feast. Life progressed so slowly in the ocean, things stayed the same for millenia, and in comparison to that, the humans went from guests in her space to intruders in it faster than anything in the ocean could comprehend. It had begun with them retrieving their dead, the most basic offering a creature could give to the sea, sometimes months after the ocean had claimed them. Once they had started doing that, they had truly broken away from the cycle that bonded all things. The invasion rapidly progressed after that, moving from putting structures on the oceans coast, to putting them within the ocean itself. They had gone from sailing on the ocean's surface to prying into its abyss. In just the lifespan of a whale, the places in the sea untouched by man had decreased dramatically, if not by their hands personally, then by their waste. They had left entire islands of inedible masses of material that would never decompose, it was unusable to the great ocean and only served to crowd its surface, and poison it’s depths. Even in its deepest trenches, humanity had found ways to disrupt the oceans' stillness. It was in one of these great underwater canyons that they had caught her, resting among the heat of the vents that sustained so much of the life that inhabited the ocean’s floor. The machines they used to navigate the waters were becoming more discrete and indiscernible, quiet enough that their approach hadn't woken her, their presence drowned out by the squeaks of dolphins and rumblings of giant beasts the humans had thought long extinct. In some great irony the men that abducted her probably thought they were doing some good, they would have recognized her form as familiar, if out of place, it wouldn’t have been until they had gotten closer that they would have truly been able to comprehend what she was.

At one point she wanted to believe that her impressment was the result of a misunderstanding, that once the humans understood what she was they’d let her go. Now she knew, no amount of empathy would free her from her restraints, the humans would find a way to invalidate every expression of her sentience. That aspect of her reality had set in only days after her capture. When the humans had first imprisoned her they had placed her in a tube not much wider than herself, she barely had room to completely turn around. They had prodded her, stabbed her, they had taken her blood, her scales, they had violated her entire being, degrading her in ways that made her feel like less than prey even. She had fought back for so much of it, flailing against her captors as more of them calmly assisted in her submission. Even without a direct ability to communicate, her discomfort was as evident as their indifference. She didn’t know how many different ‘specimen containers’ she had been in or how many different ways they had hurt her but she knew at some point she had started to change.

She didn't know exactly why the changes started, she didn't even know if it was an inherent trait her species had, or an effect of her mistreatment. She had begun to become stunted and shriveled, possibly due to her claustrophobic conditions, or perhaps because of the drastic difference in oxygen content of the water-like fluid that filled her compact receptacle. The humans observing her at that time had long extremities that extended out from a length of white material and large reflective eyes, they reminded her of squid. Those humans appeared to be very invested in her state of being, but she doubted that they ever considered that the early stages of her metamorphosis could be the consequence of her body retreating into itself as her mind tried to do the same. Over the course of what had to have been several new moons, despite the numerous changes they made to her environment, she continued to degenerate. Every new day her psyche fought harder to escape the cycle of pain and defilement that was enacted upon her, and everyday she became less. Her suffering was driving her to insanity, her higher processes began to cease, her mind only being stimulated by the most base impulses: hunger, light, sounds, as her body regressed as well. As her eyes became accustomed to seeing the same thing day in and out, they became large and expressionless, migrating towards the sides of her face. Her mouth had become wide and massive, her teeth breaking apart and reforming into sharp rows. Her muscular jointed limbs, once able to perform dexterous tasks like seizing crabs and moving rocks, became small and flipper-like. Her lower limbs had fused together, the webbed ends of each compounding and rotating into a large vertical fin. Her physiology had changed itself, mimicking a form that had been reliable since before the time of giant reptilian leviathans, a form that specialized in eating and persisting.

Her thoughts became sparse and monotonous, blending together into an endless reel of hunger and depression.

“This one’s a lost cause too. Subjects consistently go through sharkification within 4 months of removing them from the wild, regardless of water pressure, oxygen rate, or water composition. Even taking water directly from their spawning grounds only slows sharkification by a week at best.”

“Send Subject to location 28.4097° N, 81.4597° W and begin attempts to procure a new subject.” The sounds the humans around her made meant less to her at that point than ever, but those were the last noises the squid-people had uttered before she had been stuck with another syringe that rendered her completely unconscious.

When she awoke she was in her current domain. The increase in the size of her confinement along with the reprieve of of the more intimate features of her previous torture allowed the last reminemnts of her concious to present itself once more. For a brief period of time she had believed that she would be let go, and some part of her held onto that hope, but the parts of her that were capable of hope had begun to fade away again. She just hoped that if a method of escape ever presented itself she would have the wherewithal to utilize it. For now she just swam in circles. This is what happens when you remove the woman from the mermaid, take away it’s freedom, it’s communication, everything that a person would recognize as it’s humanity. Your left with a fish submerged in water but deprived of the joy of the sea.