Denial
Singularity’s Children, Book One — Toby Weston
Chapter 1 – Restricted Vocabulary
Globs of viscous sauce coiled with the current. A petite woman in white one-piece overalls worked her way around the pool’s edge to where a paper cup and party hat floated, half-submerged, trapped against the filter grating. The woman swept a fine net through the water. She was using its long telescopic pole to retrieve food and party detritus before it could sink. Most of the teenage boys, having lost interest in the pool and its residents, had moved away to play a free-form hybrid of table tennis and dodge-ball
with the mounds of uneaten food decorating the picnic tables.
“His mother’s called Anna. She’s over in the other pen,” a second woman said, pointing across the pool. “She had to learn the Syntax as an adult, but Blue here grew up with the interface.”
Niato watched as a sequence of pixel-icons appeared on the screen of the large Companion lying across his knees. The woman would presumably be seeing the same symbols on the chunky pair of waterproof Spex she wore over the hood of her wetsuit.
‘Blue; Anna; question’
“He wants to go back to his mother,” she explained.
Niato looked away in response to an agonising cry that morphed into a snarled expletive. Ignoring his friends, he turned again to the woman in the pool.
“Just a few minutes more?” he asked.
“Okay. Just a couple.”
‘Blue; fish; question’
“Now he wants more fish,” she said.
“There aren’t any,” Niato said, shaking the empty bucket.
“Send him ‘Fish’ and ‘Empty’.”
“How is the fish empty?”
“It’s not. The grammar is simplified. ‘Empty’ stands in for any ‘Negative’. It can also mean ‘no’ or ‘nothing’.”
Niato pecked at the matrix of symbols covering most of the Companion’s screen—a grid of abstract, blocky, pixelated icons displaying a few dozen nouns and verbs. He chose symbols and strung together a sentence for the young dolphin.
‘Fish; empty’
To soften the blow, Niato also sent:
‘Boy; Blue; Friend’
Blue lifted his face out of the water and peered sideways at Niato. He wore a skull cap that housed
the neural scanning tech which enabled their crude cross-species conversation. It was held in place by a tube of neoprene; it looked like a black balaclava with Blue’s smiling beak poking comically out of the front.
Niato laughed.
‘Boy; clock; house; question’
“He is asking when are you going home,” the woman translated.
‘Half; Clock’
“Is that right?” Niato asked before sending.
“You mean half an hour?”
Niato nodded.
“Yes . ‘Clock’ can be both time and hour. He will understand that.”
Niato pressed send. Blue’s ‘face’ was fixed in a permanent smile, but Niato thought he could detect something in the eye watching him as his message arrived. The eye looked away for a second, then
flicked back simultaneous to the arrival of a new message.
‘Blue; house; empty’
“What does he mean?”
“I don’t know. He’s getting tired. It’s time to let him get back to his mother.”
‘Anna; house; empty; Blue; empty’
“What does that mean? The pool isn’t empty?”
“Let’s get back to your friends.”
The woman nodded to her colleague with the net. The cleaner acknowledged the signal, withdrew her pole, and turned away. She walked towards the small booth that controlled the wire mesh gate. The gate would release Blue from the smaller shallow pool, where he had been confined, to make it easier for the boys to ‘experience’ a close encounter.
‘Fish; fish; fish; fish; fish; fish; fish; fish; fish; fish; fish’
‘Fish; empty’ Niato sent with a smile. “You can’t have any more fish, you greedy grandma!”
‘Fish; fish; fish; fish; fish; moon; fish; fish; fish; fish; moon; fish; fish; fish; fish; moon; clock; empty’
Blue sent his message and then kept his small intense eye focused on Niato. He seemed to wait for some indication of comprehension. When nothing was forthcoming, he reared up and chittered loudly, then dipped below the ripples.
Without warning, he surfaced again and slapped his tail against the surface of the pool. With a
startling clap, a sheet of freezing water splashed out and soaked Niato to the skin. The dolphin then powered away in a tight curve and raced off towards the gate, which had finished sliding open.
Niato stood and shook his arms . He ran his fingers through his streaming hair. His friends interrupted their hyperactive game to point and laugh uproariously at the drenched birthday boy.
He had announced his departure, leaving the other kids to laugh and cavort while waiting for autos or chauffeured limousines. He wound down the window to wave and shout farewell. He could smell weed. The auto pulled away from the curb and into traffic .
Behind him, an unmarked vehicle followed closely. Niato ignored it.
He had loved dolphins for as long as he could remember. He had learnt to swim for them, his mother encouraging him by promising that, once he had learnt, she would take him to the sea to play with them.
His grandfather hadn’t approved, which meant his father hadn’t either.
Since then, each year, partly to indulge her son, but also as a small act of rebellion calculated to
annoy her husband, they had flown to the southern islands. As he got older, his mother focused more on her yoga and Niato had migrated towards proper diving; but at least once per trip they would go back to the sandy beach with its crystal waters where wild dolphins came into the shallows. It was their bond.
When he had heard there were dolphins nearby who could talk, he had insisted that he be allowed to visit. He hadn’t fully appreciated the logistical unfeasibility of the request, but neither had he understood the vast magnitude of his family’s wealth.
They arrived home. Gates swung open at their approach: silent oiled iron. One of the men bowed from behind the half-mirrored glass of the gatehouse. Niato recognised his face, but didn’t recall his name .
The tailing vehicle didn’t follow them onto the estate. It would round the corner and pull into a small compound hidden by the road’s curve. The Munisai were a traditional and private family. Niato’s
grandfather insisted ugly realities stay out of sight and out of mind.
***
‘Fish; fish; fish; moon; fish; fish; moon; clock; empty’ – or something like that.
It was a riddle. It nagged at Niato. For weeks, it preoccupied his waking and sleeping mind. What had it meant? Blue had been waiting for something, expecting some response, but then, frustrated, he had
lashed out and rage-quit.
Niato neglected his math and Nipponese and spent his time reading everything he could find relating to the Institute of Mammalian Cognition. Little was publicly accessible, but through the SubStation
forums, he tracked down a few papers illegally hosted on a pirate academic site.
He ignored his Pot-Head friends, who mocked his obsession and were, anyway, becoming tiresome. He read research papers, understanding only fragments. He stumbled into forums of direct-action-
collectives and spent days on boards full of anger and hate for those who kept these serene spirits of the open ocean in cramped, filthy pools.
He felt the first cold glimmer of understanding when he had found the full vocabulary of the pixel- icon language. A single one of its three by three icons could represent any one of five-hundred and
twelve words, but they could be paired and arranged into more complicated grammars. The tiny subset he had been given on the Institute’s Companion had hardly scratched its surface. There had been so
many questions he would have asked that were too clumsy and cryptic to formulate with the handful of symbols at his disposal. He had felt cheated. For a long time, he could not understand the point of
hobbling their communication.
The limitation wasn’t with the dolphin’s capacity for learning. Blue was named explicitly in papers
where researchers explored complex abstract concepts. He was a prodigy. The language might not be his mother tongue, but it was close. He had been communicating with the pixel-icons since he was a calf.
‘Fish; fish; fish; moon; fish; fish; fish; moon; clock; empty’
Blue would have known the moon. Swimming cramped laps within the tiled artificial rectangle, it would have been one of the few intrusions of a wider organic world.
Awareness of privilege had begun eroding Niato’s sense of worth. He needed a purpose. He decided he needed to talk with this friend again—and this time without the arbitrary limitations of a restricted vocabulary.
It had not been easy to get access to the Institute’s computers, but he was a capable teenager with
access to considerable resources. Even so, his first attempt at recruiting a Cyber-Ronin had ended with a scammer disappearing with all of his CryptoCoins. As a silver lining, the pity generated had transmuted via emotional alchemy into reputation, and he had made contact with a group of genuine hacktivists.
These new friends provided the means. At first, they had wanted to sell him their standard ransom-
ware and cyber-griefing packages, but he wanted something more elegant. He wanted to talk to Blue and let him know he understood the crime. The Institute was keeping Blue physically captive; but, even
worse, having given him the capacity to communicate, they were denying him the opportunity.
‘Fish; fish; fish; moon; fish; fish; fish; moon; fish; fish; fish; moon; clock; empty’.
Days spent eating stiff, still fish. Tedium measured by the cycles of the moon. A life of repetition and monotony and at the end, when his time was over, nothing, empty.
The network penetration had been elegant: a remote, unaudited tunnel between Blue’s interface and Niato’s Companion. Illicit nights spent in secret communication had followed. The link between the two adolescent mammals became a joining of worlds.
Linguistic gag gone, Blue used his voice, at first, to rail furiously against his captors, with Niato
lumped in alongside every other human. He was angry. Niato took long, patient weeks to establish some level of credibility; but slowly, as he explained in simple crude pixel-icon brush strokes the world
outside the Institute, Blue had calmed down, hot anger transitioning into cold resolution.
They left childhood together. Their world views merged. Blue, in his pool, wanted to smash it all. Niato, with freedom to operate, felt obligated to assist.
‘Big; ocean; dirty; question’ Blue asked one day.
‘Boy; clean; ocean’ Niato replied, pecking out his response.
Over the next few years, newspapers gleefully reported Niato’s acts of sabotage and vandalism,
delighting in the shame the Munisai clan’s eldest son was bringing down on his family. His father, never hands-on, had tried clumsily to correct his son’s wayward course, but Niato had become an
embarrassment and, eventually, at his grandfather’s insistence, he had been cast out.
As far as the family was concerned, he had been radicalised and recruited.
***
‘Blue; clock; ocean; question’
‘Today; night; four; clock’ Niato selected the symbols on the surface of his Companion. The room was full of the sounds and smells of sleeping terrorists.
Blue didn’t send a response but Niato, could imagine he would be whistling loudly in his pool, excitement making him fall back to native sounds.
Some of the others were now groaning and stretching as Companion alarms vibrated.
‘Goodbye;’
‘Boy; love; Blue’ Niato sent, feeling a little self-conscious.
‘Today; night; ocean’ Blue sent back.
Niato struggled out of his sleeping bag. It was six o’clock in the afternoon, but their direct-action-
collective had been running on an adjusted cycle in preparation for tonight’s action and it felt like the middle of the night. Light from the dropping sun shone through slots in the blackout blinds. Somebody
was making coffee. The smell made its way into the room and had the desired effect of accelerating the waking process.
Niato called up Basil, the captain of Nebulous, the group’s crowd-funded protest vessel which was
lurking sixty miles offshore. They would stick around the newly freed dolphins for the first few days.
Everything was ready. They had plenty of fish in reserve in case Blue or his mother were unable to hunt. Basil confirmed they would soon start motoring towards the rendezvous.
Niato pulled his jacket over his fleece and slung the backpack over his shoulder. It was cold outside as they waited for Jack in the collective’s knackered old hatchback. A few other people were around. An elderly woman with shopping bags passed by and eyed the huddle of youths suspiciously.
Eventually, a car rattled to a halt and they piled in, stuffing all their gear in the back. The driver turned around and did a quick head count, then pulled away. At thirty-five, Jack was the old man .
Niato sat up front. In the back, Dee and Shota were squashed up against the windows by Yuto’s
expansive butt. The car now contained a third of the eco-collective; the others should be on their way too, riding in other vehicles. The reputation and allure of an eco-insurgency run by a dolphin and the wayward son of a billionaire attracted a steady flow of new members; all but the most hard-core were turned away.
This would be the group’s second prison-break operation. A bold step up from the previous target, which had been a sea park conveniently located on the coast. A quick snip with the bolt croppers had opened a gate, and their marine comrades had swum into an estuary and then out to sea and freedom. Unfortunately, the Institute of Mammalian Cognition was twenty-five kilometres inland.
Niato glanced at Dee in the mirror. She was probably two years younger than he was, sixteen or seventeen, he guessed, dressed like the others in black.
‘Boy; clock; question’ Blue sent.
‘One; clock’ Niato replied.
He nodded to the driver of the white van as they passed it on the freeway. By design, all the vehicles were older models requiring manual control. Automation might shirk at some manoeuvres they would be forced to make over the next couple of hours.
The last time he had visited the Institute in person had been nearly four years ago. It wasn’t a tourist attraction. It had only been the influence and generous donations of Niato’s family that had ever
persuaded them to host a spoilt teenager’s birthday party in the first place.
The Institute was set in its own grounds, encircled by scrubby forest. Faint simian hoots echoed over the high, functional walls surrounding and obscuring the buildings within. They kept to the trees until
they received a message, suggesting the cameras and alarms might now be offline. The sender had made sure to employ enough conditionals and weasel words in his message that he would be absolved of all
responsibility in any event.
Dee, boosted by Yuto, swung a wad of blankets over the glass shards embedded into the top of the wall. She tested with her hands; then, using Yuto’s shoulders and head as a ladder, climbed over and
dropped quietly down the other side. Niato followed in the same fashion, apologising as he abused his friend’s face with his toe.
A riot of screams and a metallic beating of cages erupted from within a low building to their left.
Lights tripped by movement flicked on. They froze, holding their breath as they waited for alarms, but apparently the circuits were all local.
With a pang of guilt, Niato ignored the primates and they pressed on to the pool, where Blue and his mother and sister would be waiting.
‘Boy;pool’ he sent, then grinned as he heard his friend’s excited chittering. Emotion modulated compression waves in air; direct and ancient.
‘Light; man; where; question’ Niato asked.
A few seconds later, a map appeared on Niato’s Companion, showing him Blue’s best guess at the position of the night watch. The neural interface allowed Blue to choose pixel-icons by mentally
bumping a virtual pallet, in the same way he could indicate locations on the map of the Institute Niato had uploaded.
Perfect; the man was still in the hut by the front gate. Dee turned to Niato and they exchanged raised eyebrows. He nodded towards the back gate and she headed off. He continued on towards the fence
around the dolphin pool. He used pliers to cut through the wire mesh and, making sure the gap was wide enough, used cable ties to fold the fence back out of the way. The lights were still off inside the dolphin compound, but he could make out shapes in the water surging towards the soft sounds of his feet.
Another combustion engine arrived. He heard talking, then several loud clicks as bolt croppers were used to ‘unlock’ the back delivery gate.
‘Light; man;’Blue sent with a new map, showing the security guard was on the move .
The monkeys had calmed down, and the place was quiet again. Niato crouched down against a low wall. He could see the beam of a torch swaying from side to side as the guard did his rounds.
Now came the tricky part.
From the front came a commotion. The decoy drunken and injured hikers had arrived. Niato could hear shouting and a booming, as fists beat on the front gate. The torch halted mid-swing. At the next boom, the guard turned and headed off back towards the reception at the front of the Institute. Niato could just make out his irritated muttering.
In a crouching scuttle, Niato covered the few metres to the side of the pool.
‘Quiet’ he sent, trying to calm the excited whistles. The three dolphins had lifted their chests out of the water and were sculling in tight circles, craning to resolve Niato’s shape.
Silently, Dee led six new arrivals to where Niato was crouching at the water’s edge.
“Who first?” she asked.
‘Go; Blue; Anna; Tinkerbell; question’ Niato sent.
The dolphins dropped back below the surface. Niato’s Companion tried to decipher the dialog passing between them, but little seemed to be in the Institute’s language.
After what seemed like several minutes, Dee looked significantly at Niato. Time was critical; they
needed to load three dolphins into two vans and bugger off before the drunk, injured, and confused hiker act wore thin and the guard came back to check for whatever had spooked the rhesus monkeys.
‘Clock’ he sent.
Seconds later, Blue surfaced and looked sideways at Niato.
‘Anna;Tinkerbell’ Blue sent.
“Let’s start with the mother, then the baby,” Niato said to the other humans.
Dee and Shota slipped into the water with the larger sling. Niato joined them and swam out to cajole Anna into the shallows. Initially, she was compliant; but proximity to—and then contact with—the sling made her increasingly agitated. Suddenly, with a colossal splash, she surged away.
“Shit. Looks like mother has some trauma from when she was captured,” Shota said.
“Okay, let’s try Tinkerbell then. Let me tell Blue the change of plan,” Niato said.
‘Tinkerbell’ he sent to Blue.
Blue seemed to understand and nudged his sister towards the smaller sling. The baby swam past,
nervously keeping close to its mother, who had returned from a ragged circuit of the pool. For the first time, Niato noticed the white scarring across the baby’s brow and the slight bulge between her eyes. He had read about the operation, but still recoiled at the sight.
At the last minute, the little dolphin seemed to notice it was being lifted out of the water and began to flex and whistle with panic. This set off another uncomfortable episode from Anna. Blue swam to his
splashing, screaming mother; he nuzzled her and thrummed calming vibrations through the water between them.
Now, the baby was out of the water on her way to the van. She was small enough that just two people were able to carry her through the gap in the fence Niato had cut.
The others, still at the pool, tried again with the mother; Niato stroking her back, while Blue lay
against her side. They moved her again over the sling. She was clearly agitated, but the sight and sounds of her baby being carried away out of the water and beyond her reach seemed to galvanise her resolve,
and she permitted the sides of the canvas sling to be raised up. It took four pole-bearers to lift her out of the water.
Everybody was concentrating now, focusing on the tricky operation and trying not to slip or drop the awkward, flexing, 400-kilogram tube.
Nobody noticed a new arrival.
“What the hell is this?” asked the astonished voice of the security guard. He had rounded the wall and was staring incredulously at the pantomime playing out on the other side of the pool.
The rescuers froze, petrified, mid-pose. The guard fumbled at his hip.
The brief awkward stand-off persisted until Blue’s cackling urged them to action. Yuto gave the pole a push, and the others clambered out of the water and started to hurry off in the direction of the truck.
“Hey!” the guard shouted. He equivocated for another two seconds, then shot at the largest available target. The electro-dart arced sub-sonically over the water. Yuto grunted and staggered as it penetrated
his gluteus. Without his support, the sling sagged and the others strained to keep the mother from rolling out onto the wet tiles.
Niato tried not to betray any signs of awareness as he picked out the shape of their colleague—the
male half of the drunken hiker distraction—creeping up behind the guard; but, alerted by some sound, the guard turned at the last second and, without fuss, shot the now miraculously sober hiker point blank. His would-be attacker fell, writhing, to the ground.
Back in the van, the baby Tinkerbell had begun a screaming lament. Anna answered with her own high, dry whistle and flexed her tail in panic. Three sets of straining arms endeavoured to keep control.
The guard had approached the pool and faced the group across eight metres of agitated water.
‘Anna; Tinkerbell; ocean’ Blue sent. Niato could make out his form at the bottom of the pool, approaching quickly.
“No!” he shouted, understanding his friend’s plan.
A bulb of water bulged and burst.
The shocked guard staggered back from the edge, but not fast enough to avoid the mouth that closed on his extended forearm. Inertia lifted him off his feet and then gravity tugged them both back into the pool.
The water closed over. Ripples stilled. A stunned silence descended.
“Get them to the fucking van!” Jack shouted, breaking the spell.
Yuto had pulled out the dart.
Limping heavily, they set off to where Tinkerbell was still keening pitifully.
“He’s called backup. We couldn’t stop him!” shouted Tori, the other drunken hiker, now also arriving on the scene. She crouched down to help her friend, who was slowly regaining control after his electric shocking.
With a splash, the guard cleared the surface, coughing and thrashing his arms . Before he could take more than a lungful of air, he was tugged down again by the teeth, now fixed on his ankle. Sirens could be heard in the distance.
“Oh shit, it’s going to kill him!” Jack screamed.
‘Stop’ Niato sent.
‘Light; man; stay’
‘Boy; go’ Blue sent back.
“Go!” Dee shouted. “I’ll stay and sort this out. They won’t be able to hold me .”
“She’s right. She’s a juvenile. The police won’t be able to touch her. Let’s fucking go, man!” Jack explained, somewhat hysterically.
Niato stood frozen, listening, as tyres skidded to a halt on the gravel at the front of the Institute. He didn’t want to leave Blue or Dee, but he couldn’t think of alternatives that didn’t involve murder.
‘Go’ Blue sent again, allowing the thrashing guard another gasp of air.
Chapter 2 – The Sea
An infinite succession of tiny wavelets slapped the canoe’s wooden hull. Each an embodiment of
platonic perfection, brittle and crystalline, cast from sunlight and water. As the waves met the mundane matter of the boat’s hull, they shattered, their Bezier-curve beauty dissolving into a pixelated jumble of sound and light.
The girl, focusing beyond the surface chaos, pointed and giggled at the pale, shimmering ghost
making its way under the boat. Marcel’s white buttocks were a clear flag; the remainder of the boy’s
form was lost beneath a confusing mirror of reflections. Stella’s mother sat at the other end of the boat, Marcel’s dad resting his head on her lap. She showed uncharacteristic tenderness as she played with his hair, sometimes bending down to whisper close to his ear.
Four hundred metres away, a green bump, topped by a rocky pyramid, was surrounded by concentric halos of white and turquoise. Their boat was floating above a protrusion of reef rising close to the
surface. Small fish, nosing into the nooks and crevices of the reef, fought the slow push and pull of the swell. The tide’s gentle current held the anchor line taut. In front of them, towards the small island, the water deepened and then dropped to ninety metres, before rising up in a low, sandy slope to the shore. Sometimes, huge shoals of fish would be forced between the caldera’s outer reef and the shore as they chased seething balls of baitfish. On lucky days, Marcel’s village would catch them and celebrate.
Stella pulled on her flippers, glanced one more time at her mother, and plopped into the scintillating waters. She swam towards Marcel, who was now using his folded arms to hang off the outrigger. He
smiled, still breathing hard from his dive. She couldn’t emulate Marcel’s effortless grace, but, with a
splash and some floundering at the surface, she dived and paddled down with her feet, her arms at her
sides. A stream of bubbles rose from the corners of her mouth and floated chaotically toward the surface. She came up next to her friend.
She had been thinking about grabbing his feet as she surfaced; but, ultimately afraid, unable to gauge his response, she had changed her mind. They had only been friends for a few hours, since the boy’s
father had picked them up from the Farm and sailed them here to his ancestral island. The boy and his father spoke only a little English and Cantonese. Stella was able to piece together conversations in
Nipponese or Alman, and she knew bits and pieces, or could at least recognise, half a dozen more
languages spoken by the fishermen and crew in this part of the world. Even so, the narrow linguistic
overlap with the island’s patois left the two children communicating mostly at the level of gestures and smiles.
The boy grinned at her as she grabbed onto the outrigger. Stella looked at her mom . She was still
smiling, eyes closed. Stella had never seen her mother in such a good mood for such a long period of
time—unless she was high. But those times didn’t count because, as soon as she was not high, she’d
drop into a murderous rage. By the age of six, Stella had known how things worked, and she tried not to be around at those times. Perhaps, her mother was high now. Stella had noticed none of the nasty
equipment, but maybe she’d smoked something while Stella hadn’t been watching. Perhaps, that was why the boy was out here. Perhaps, he was waiting as far away as he could get for the inevitable rage.
“You scared of your dad?” she asked, while engaging the appropriate gestures and mimes in case he didn’t understand.
“Scared?” he repeated the unfamiliar word.
Stella clutched her hands to her sternum and mimed a frightened face, complete with quivering lip. “Scared, afraid, you understand?”
“Yes, understand. No fear.”
“Why are you trying to get away from them? Scared of my mom? No problem, she never hits other children.”
“Huh? Hit your mother? Only swimming.” He thought for a few seconds, unsettled by the strange questions. “Your Mom, she … hitting?” he asked, demonstrating a hand slapping his face.
Stella didn’t answer, suddenly afraid her mother might have been watching their pantomimes of
violent domestic dysfunction. There didn’t seem to be a logical progression from this point, so Marcel dived down below the surface again with his little spear gun. Stella dipped her head to follow his
progress.
The island was part of a marine park controlled by the Nipponese/Prussian conglomerate that ran the huge floating farms. Marcel’s father was considered lucky by the islanders; he had managed to get a job on a farm, the same one where Stella and her mother lived. He still kept a hut where his first wife and
other children lived. Stella, having grown up on the cramped, hectic Farm, thought this island looked much nicer; at least you could climb up the hill if a big storm came .
She watched Marcel swim gently up to a parrotfish and shoot it expertly through the gills, from about a metre away. The fish thrashed in a futile attempt to escape the metal rod that had pierced its head, its
life tinting the water red. Then Marcel swam up, breaking the surface with his raised hand, triumphantly clutching the speared fish. The grown-ups, looking over at the commotion, clapped and waved their
congratulations to him.
“I try?” Stella asked, as the boy took the still struggling fish off the spear and dropped it into the canoe .
“Yes, you know how gun work?”
She nodded. The boy leant on the spear gun, pressing the point of the bolt against the tough old wood of the outrigger. It slipped deeper into the barrel, until there was a click.
“Fish, then trigger.” He repeated the motions for Stella. “Be close to fish. Okay?”
Stella nodded and accepted the barrel; it was heavier than she had expected. She grinned at the boy and then pushed herself down into the water with her free hand. Marcel ducked beneath the surface too, pressing his hands against the underside of the boat to keep himself submerged as he watched.
Stella found it difficult to swim with just one arm, but she pumped her flippers hard enough to send herself down toward a shoal of silver fish, drifting with the waves near a big outcrop of coral. She was running out of breath and her ears were hurting, so she gave one last paddle, held the gun out in front, and squeezed the trigger.
The spear left a trail of bubbles as it shot out toward the shoal; but, by the time it reached the fish, it
was travelling slowly enough that, with a minimum of fuss, the school flicked out of its way.
Disappointed, but somehow relieved that she hadn’t hurt anything, Stella kicked her legs and let herself float back up to the surface. Marcel gathered the loops of barely visible line and fitted the spear back into the gun. He insisted she take it and have another go.
By the time she finally got one, the sun was almost down. Flushed with success, Stella swam over to the boat to show her mom the prize. She could see Marcel’s father leaning back with his eyes closed, but she wanted her own mother to see the fish. She pulled herself out of the water and brought her eyes level with the side of the canoe, but she had already inadvertently sent a surge of water onto Marcel’s father’s lap and, unexpectedly, onto the back of her mother’s head.
Electrocuted by the cold water, her mother turned and screamed “Sei hoi! I’m busy!”
Stella dropped back into the water. She forgot about the fish, which swam away trailing a bloody
mist. Marcel followed, eventually scooping it up with a net once it had exhausted itself, and brought it back to her.
“You okay? Why she angry?”
“She’s busy.”
Much later, they grilled the fish on a flat stone, in the middle of the canoe, while the grown-ups drank little cups of wine. Marcel cooked Stella’s fish and prepared it on a banana leaf for her. Stella’s mom
jeered at this, pointing at the kids and whispering something to Marcel’s dad. He didn’t look like he
thought whatever she said was very funny. Stella wondered why her mom said nasty things. She could already tell that Marcel’s dad was getting tired of her; couldn’t her mom see it, too?
They slept on the boat that night. It got cold once dusk descended and the disappearing sun left a
chill. Marcel and Stella slept next to each other in their sleeping bags. Marcel’s father had covered them with a tarpaulin to stop the dew soaking them through.
Sometime in the night, the inevitable argument came. After the children had fallen asleep, Stella’s
mom insisted on smoking a little pipe before bed. Marcel’s dad raised his voice in protest, and her mom shrieked back at him like a harpy. Stella, attuned to the dangers her mother presented, flicked her eyes open in time to watch the man’s face. In the firelight, she saw rage, resignation, and then indifference
follow one another in quick succession. She closed her eyes. She knew they wouldn’t be coming here again.
***
About Toby Weston: Toby Weston writes science fiction where the science is load-bearing. His Singularity’s Children series opens with corporate rot, a nomadic floating tuna farm and a radicalised dolphin, and ends somewhere wildly post-human. British, based in Switzerland, formerly a software engineer and computational neuroscientist, he thinks the future is going to be a lot more fun than advertised. Start with Denial.
Author’s site:
https://tobyweston.net
Where to buy:
https://tobyweston.net/books/
Still here? Good sign.
That was the first two chapters of Denial , book one of the
Singularity’s Children series.
It carries on from here: 4 books, 1 Singularity,
and considerably more dolphin.
