Surfacebreak

No one can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. I wouldn’t know, yet, but I do know that not hearing anything would be a welcome blessing for my people. The screams of our brothers and sisters ripple through the depths at all hours, some shrill and desperate, others hollow and defeated, but all stretched and distorted by the vast reaches of saltwater in every direction.

In space the absence of matter means that sound can’t travel, because without a medium the soundwaves cannot spread. That’s what my science teacher told us in grade school, anyway, and I imagined the sweet, endless silence that must wait up there, beyond the surface and beyond the sky. The idea stuck with me – the possibility that somewhere, there could be silence, an escape from the haunting, horrifying noise that has become the soundtrack to all of our lives. Since that momentary daydream in science class I have dedicated my life to realizing that escape.

Many before me have tried escaping – some with science, some with art, some with drugs. I’ll admit I’ve tried each of them a couple of times. But science has always felt the most satisfying, the most possible, the most lasting way to end the torture of hearing them scream. Plus, more importantly, it seemed to me the only way to end the torture that caused the screams, not merely to muffle them or distract myself from their pain.

And it also felt fitting, since I’d had the vision in science class, that science would be the key. The day after my daydream I rushed to school early to visit Mm. Aibendelle and ask her more questions about soundwaves, but her grotto was empty. The reef we were meant to study that afternoon shone ghostly pale, all the color and life drained and the corals wispy and flaccid. I swam closer to investigate, but the water stung my skin and I retreated. Mle. Ambroroff taught us how to recognize and treat salinity poisoning for science that day, and all our classes were held on the other side of the trench. I never saw Mm. Aibendelle at school again.

I thought of her every day, as I achieved my Certifiance and my Advancement, and then began training for the Surfacebreak Program. I thought of her before every examination, every research talk, before every application and after every acceptance or rejection note. When I felt like quitting and when I floated on a high of scientific breakthrough, I remembered her. I visited her grotto and the bleached reef for years, at ever-increasing distances as the stinging water spread, until the Hazards team outlawed the area entirely.

I wish today more than ever that I could visit her grotto again, visit her, even, and tell her that I’d done it – we’d done it. We are no longer prisoners in this poisonous water. We are no longer helpless to save our brothers and sisters, our parents and children. We can not only escape their screaming, but end it. We can leave, we can heal, we can grow and thrive and finally, for the first time in generations, we will hear silence. Today, we leave this doomed planet and strike out on our quest to write our own history, our own future, free from the devastation that the humans began when they discovered that burning dead things could fuel their civilizations. We no longer had to pay for their disregard of the cycles of the sun. Today, we would fly toward that sun and make amends for our failure to stop them, and finally, finally be free.

* * * * *

I arrive at Surfacebreak Mission Control and the whole campus fizzes with activity. The pods float at intervals in front of the reef with custodians and mechanics sanitizing and running final checks. Harvesters have been delivering rations for weeks and have been arriving in a steady tide all morning. Engineers finish calculations and triple-check emergency protocols, and captains relay these to the crew. The nursery bubbles with young ones playing while their parents complete their work on this great exodus. The families who will travel as passengers only, who will not be preparing the ships or piloting the pods or feeding or teaching or protecting or providing care to the pilgrims once aboard, all wait together in a cavern away from the complex and sensitive choreography unfolding to usher us all to the stars.

Only a small group of them would originally have joined us today, on this first journey, but the last algae bloom left half our young ones covered in rashes and scars that only increased their risk of heat sickness and salinity poisoning. Another bloom was due later this season, at least as toxic as the last. Every threat grew with each passing cycle and new ones emerged from the depths like zooplankton, invisible but pervasive. If our people were to escape, we were running out of time. There would be no test-run, no back-up plan, for our people’s endeavor to survive beyond the sky.

We’d traveled to space before, of course, for short missions and research endeavors, but the temperature and weather volatility had made leaving the water too costly, and later even approaching the surface became too dangerous. We’d stayed beneath the water since before I was born. I entered the first class of the Surfacebreak program in generations. The Certifiance board reopened the program when I was eleven migrations old with the explicit – and controversial – goal to someday free our people from this planet. I began my presentation for entry immediately and entered the following migration.

My class began with 93 members from all over the Pacific. It trickled down to 80 by the end of the cycle and continued to shrink as classmates or their loved ones succumbed to the heat, or the acidity, or the red tide, or mind-bleaching from such stress and fear. A few left to raise families, but hardly anyone my age wants to bring children into this ocean if they can help it. Now, with the possibility of escape, hope has begun to bloom again, but we don’t yet know what dangers lie in living beyond the sky. Soon, though, we will be free. We will soar above the clouds, away from the stinging water and the empty white reefs. A light shines at the end of the trench – just one more thermalshoot to maneuver before our dreams will be of joy and children and grandchildren and real futures, not just silence and relief and escape.

A current on my shoulder pulls me from my reverie. Eirie floats by my left side, her eyes luminescent with anxious excitement. She always looks anxious to some degree, and her fingers usually wibble in front of her, as if they could gather data from the currents and bubbles like the anemones. Now, though, she hovers next to me, stiffened, with her hands pressing the water away from her hips, eyes like lava. Her sister was evacuated to the screaming reefs almost a migration ago. I’ve not seen this light in her eyes since before her sister’s first sore appeared.

“We did it, Aynna. We’re going. We’re all going.” She brushes her shoulder against mine. I return the gesture. My skin warms, but not from the increasing water temperature. Not even really from her, though I do love her. I receive her excitement and it courses through me, shifting my chemistry from my existential musings to more immediate emotions – anticipation, anxiety, pride at our achievement nearly realized. And hope. But not my usual flavor of hope, heavy with expectations and need. This hope from Eirie’s shoulder feels light and bubbling and fast, like young porpoises breaking the waves on their own for the first time. I memorize the feeling. I want this again.

“Are you ok?” she thinks, her voice quivery. Anxious. She’s drifted behind me a bit now.

“Yes. Great. I’m great.” I want that bubbly hope back. I float backward to brush her shoulder with mine again. “You’re right. We did it. We’ll be in the sky soon,” I think to her.

“Are you afraid?”

I consider her question. “Perhaps I should be, but no, not at all. No matter what happens now, it’ll be better than down here.”

“How do you know, though? We’ve never gone before.” Her voice is different again, suddenly, and feels strange in my head. Unfamiliar. It’s her voice, but something is off.

“I would rather die up there than wait for time to happen down here.” My words startle me. I realize what feels strange about Eirie’s voice – the anxiety has evaporated. She has spoken similar sentences to me many times, but I’ve never heard her think without pinching her thoughts off at the end, or rushing them into the water before she loses her nerve. How do you know, though? We’ve never gone before. No fear, no hesitation. She wasn’t looking for reassurance or explanation. She wanted to know more about me, not the situation. For the first time, she sounded free.

She swims a loop and then treads next to me again. “I know what you mean. I’ve been daydreaming about sleeping on the beach.” I try not to react at her admission, but she feels my synapses jolt. “I don’t think I would have been brave enough, but the idea of just drying out, tasting the air, feeling the sunshine – it was starting to look pretty good. But now…” her thoughts trickle off into a soft humming. I hum with her.

She begins another loop and I balance her this time. She tilts her orbit up and I tilt down, and we swim three or four intersecting circles before we rest, hovering as the current we’ve stirred up runs over our fins. I feel her heartbeat and I know she can feel mine. Both of us take time settling back to equilibrium.

I will miss the ocean, even though it barely resembles our people’s ancestral home anymore. Certain features and rituals will be difficult to recreate when we’ve adapted to lower pressures. But there will be new rituals, too, perhaps even sweeter than the ones that will fade into memory. I savor the ions of her excitement on my skin and the pattern of the water through her hair. Her chest flushes and I feel that same bubbly hope in her, this time through the water, without touching her. There’s something mixed with it, too, something electric and air-blooded. A jolt of desire runs through me. Perhaps when we reach the sky and find our depth there, children won’t be such a risk. Perhaps Eirie will feel the same.

The signal pulses through the water – for passengers, the final call to gather at the base, and for Surfacebreak crew the signal to begin initiation procedures. Eirie’s body undulates across from me in the remnants of our current. Her movement is bigger than the strength of the current. She is dancing. I want so badly to keep dancing with her. But I must complete my final duties escorting my people off this doomed planet. Soon we will dance together among the stars.

I swim a single circle around her, close enough that my tail brushes the length of hers. She shivers and arches her tail into me. I pause just a heartbeat, then leave her among the pods and swim toward the command launch center. I hope she rides in my pod. If not, I will see her on the ship.

When I arrive at the launch point, twelve of the other pod captains have already started their med checks and about twenty more float around waiting. The others will arrive shortly. The signal means that we are forty-five degrees from launch. I swim to the med post to check in, grateful that I won’t have my blood pressure and body electricity recorded yet after my swim with Eirie. I needn’t worry though. The energy in the command center boils with ions. They prickle my skin and flood my brain. I can’t separate whose emotions are whose, but fear, excitement, hope, arousal, and determination fill the water in the center and saturate my own emotions. All of us have waited for this day for migrations. All of us know our state will affect the mission, so we release our feelings to the group to manage and clarify. We know we can’t get too swept up in the current of the day, but for now, we allow the waters to flow.

Eighty-three of us must complete a full medical readiness evaluation before launch. Each escape pod will carry between forty and seventy-five merfolk, including crew. Thirty-two escape pods will carry all our civilians away from the threats in our oceans, and each pod needs a captain and first mate. The rest of the pod crews will complete limited med checks before boarding. The living ship will be launched with a skeleton crew of nineteen Surfacebreakers in special pressure-suits who will pilot and prepare the ship until the rest of us join. Originally this ship would have been launched and controlled from the seafloor, with only a crew of six onboard. With all of us escaping at once, the ship now requires nineteen.

The pods will take off at seafloor pressure and temperature, with reduction valves to release water as we lose depth. Surfacebreak Program training includes depth-loss adaptation and emergency procedures, and all of the pod pilots and crew have undergone pressure-loss desensitization over the last several cycles. If we rise too quickly or lose pressure control, the crew should be well enough to fix the problem.

We couldn’t ask all our citizens to complete full Surfacebreak training, though many of them have attended basic pressure-loss training in the Triangle. But the pressure decrease in a methane-release zone barely catches the blowfish compared to the drop that will come when we break the surface of the ocean, and again when we leave the atmosphere. We have painstakingly calculated our depth-loss speed and breaktimes, balancing the needs of our elderly, young, weak or sickened citizens with our time and fuel. But no matter how carefully we plan, no matter how exacting our procedures, no matter how complete our training, we’re only guessing at what the exit will really be like. Careful and comprehensive research may inform our guesses, but they are guesses. Sophisticated modeling and rigorous trainings may attempt to approximate the conditions, but they are approximate. And the best and the brightest of our generation may design and captain our escape, but we are only merfolk, from our top engineer to our smallest or oldest traveler. We are all breaching blindly into the unknown with desperate, willful abandon. This is it.

“Aynna, you’re up. Bay Four,” a nurse’s voice murmured into my mind. Eistel, I think. I swim to Bay Four. Eistel waves and begins my check. Another voice announces that all the crew have checked in and not to leave the launch point. My skin charge spikes on Eistel’s sensor and she chuckles. “Me too,” she thinks.

“I know, I felt it,” I think back. “All of us I bet.”

“It’s ok, I got it before. And anyway, the ranges account for that.” We knew we would feel like this today. We knew to build the excess energy into our vital signs values. But I didn’t anticipate how… bright I feel. Electrocuted. Alive.

Eistel records the last of my measurements and marks me clear. I swim to my pod and float above it, out of other captains’ currents. For a moment, it's just me, my pod, and my ocean. Our people’s whole future stretches above me. The screams will dissolve and disappear. We will meet the stars today.

The launch tone sounds. I swim one final loop in my ocean and enter my pod. May the stars welcome us. May the sky cradle us as the ocean once did. May we find silence. May we find peace.

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-Amelia