These days they say the Great Melting was inevitable. Life always expands, after all, seeking that perfect unclaimed niche with no competitors, and we’d created such a vast opportunity for anything clever enough to exploit it.

So they say.

But you suspect I know more than I’m telling, and you’ll never stop asking. But what really happened? Why, Jane? How?

Curiosity. You get that from me, my little pumpkin.

It’s a sunny day and our battery’s topped up, so I’ll boil the kettle. We’ll drink tea outside and watch the seabirds drawing beauty on the wind, a pure white like no other. And I’ll tell you the truth.

You can tell me if it was worth it.

 

~*~

 

Fifteen Years Before

“We’re being followed,” said Mandy, stomping down harder with her shitkicker boots. “Frikken’ campus security’s a joke.”

By day, the broad paths and shady trees of the campus are welcome. At night, everything both expands and draws in; the trees throwing restless shadows, the pour of wind through their foliage concealing other sounds.

“Yeah, they could do with more lights round here,” I said, matching her stomp for stomp.

How many evenings end like this when you’re a young woman? We’d gone to the pub as queens of the world, laughing, thick as thieves, just us two and the delightful surprise on our laptop, an email beginning, As part of our series highlighting promising young students in biological research, we would be delighted to feature your paper, “Bacterial Appetites: A Stomach for Polymers.”

Queens of the world, for real. A queen is a change-maker, and if this panned out the way we hoped … sure, there’d be years of research ahead to refine it, and by that I mean years of doing our very favourite thing!!! But then, with luck, it’d be Goodbye Great Pacific Garbage Patch and Hello Seabirds.

So anyway, a great night of drinking and laughing, yet once again it looked like it’d end with some leering slug puncturing our bubble. My friend Mandy is one of the smartest people I know, but she’ll always just be tits and arse to some people.

Well, aren’t we all?

But even before our campus stalker, the evening had taken a downward turn. As we were getting ready to leave the pub, I got a call from some frazzled-sounding person at the Journal of Environmental Studies.

“It’s the Journal!” I whispered to Mandy, and we high-fived each other, already planning our author photos or whatever they were asking for. A short bio, maybe; “Jane Tarrant is a fourth-year student and when she isn’t in her lab, she likes labs—Labrador retrievers, that is!!” So impressed was I with my drunken wit that I almost didn’t register what the person on the other end was actually saying. When they’d finished talking, I said, “Uh, sure, we’ll re-send it tonight.”

I waved a hand in front of Mandy, who was staring off into space, something she does more often than most people can tolerate, and often mid-sentence. “Hey, Mandy. Focus. Funny thing happened at the Journal. Somebody hacked into them and deleted all their files for the next issue. Including our paper. They need us to re-send right away so they can make deadline.”

So here we were trudging back to the lab and Mandy being all hyper-alert, so I was on edge too. There was somebody behind us, and catching up. Heavy footsteps.

You’re an arsehole if you do that late at night, no matter how honourable your intentions.

“Let’s engage our would-be suitor in conversation,” I said. “Then at least we’re looking right at him and he knows we’re onto him.”

“Oh, I’ll go one better than that. I’ll offer him a drrrrrrink!” Mandy had her stainless steel water bottle in the side pocket of her daypack. Bright red. Fitting, considering what was inside it.

“Jesus shush!” I grabbed it off her before she started flourishing it around.

Mandy’s ferocious logic has these strange gaps where other people have rules. I mean, I’m not a stickler for rules either, but labs have safety protocols for good reason. I stuffed the bottle back in its pocket.

“Jane! Calm down! Not my fault if Froydis didn’t show tonight,” said Mandy.

Froydis was meant to collect that sample and take it to her lab. Where we’d never see it again; Froydis’ lab was overseen by government agencies that wouldn’t share Mandy’s playful attitude towards biological experiments.

“That’s drunk logic, Mandy. Not logic-logic. Nobody carts lab samples around in a drink bottle.”

“I jus’ did.”

“It’s a freakin’ liability, Mandy. Not a pet!”

“Why do I luuuurv it so, then?” She flicked the drink bottle with her fingers. “Gonna take yew everywhere with me.”

“We’re going to give that damn thing to Froydis, then we’re going to earn our degrees by presenting safe lab samples cautiously developed, like everyone else.” Except Mandy’s always had her pet experiments around her, ranked innocently in the lab along with the rest, always labelled something innocuous. Hiding things in the lab was all good fun when we were just high school students; just the normal teenage urge to claim a kingdom of lies until we were old enough to have real standing in the world.

But maybe because it is just so damn hard to gain respect, ever, as a woman doing research, Mandy never grew out of her rebellious phase. I’ve never managed to persuade her that her concealments matter more than other bad habits which are merely socially unacceptable. Like nose-picking, say, which you don’t want to admit to but let’s face it, everyone does it.

If we’re going to talk about moral turpitude, well, my nose-pick is the fact that I’ve never blown the whistle on Mandy.

Between ourselves, we called the strain of bacteria in that bottle virulentis, and we’d been tinkering with it since we won our first national science prize in high school.

It’s hard to give up virulentis. It’s so tied to that first triumph: us on stage accepting our award, the cameras sizzling our image into the news of the world. “Teen Scientists and their Ocean-Saving Bug!”

Our big white grins, standing by the tank of water seeded with virulentis’ more biddable cousin, sativa. Sativa was our star performer back then, despite its finicky temperature and acidity requirements. Big time-stamped posters around us recorded the disintegration of the plastic bags and bottles we’d placed there at the beginning of the national science fair.

We were so young, how could we imagine what was coming down the pike? But even as we hugged each other and held up our trophy, we were thinking of what was waiting at home for us in the fridge.

Virulentis.

~*~

 

Mandy snapped around towards the heavy tread behind us. “You following us?”

The fitful light caught the weave of a well-filled suit, neatly combed hair. “Only making sure you get where you’re going safely.” He sounded sober at least. I couldn’t really make out his expression though.

“We’re fine, thanks.” And we kept walking. We had about fifty metres to go before we reached the big double doors that only our keycard would open.

“The campus isn’t really safe late at night,” he said. His voice was quite deep, a bit gravelly. For some reason even though he didn’t sound old, I flashed on Peter and the Wolf and the grandfather saying, “The meadow is a dangerous place, Peter. What if a wolf should come out of the forest?” The worst kind of doomsayer. You can tell Grandpa hopes a wolf will come out of the forest. That’ll learn ya, Peter.

And then, a great grey wolf did come out of the forest…

No, what happened was that another man stepped out from between a shrub and a half-column. Suddenly he was simply there, flanking us. The first man took station on our other side. It was such a well-oiled move. I grabbed Mandy’s wrist and —

Something hard pressed up against the small of my back, and it wasn’t the usual thing I worry about when a man’s standing that close to me. “Look happy and relaxed,” suggested Gravel Voice. “You’re going to key open the door and take us to your lab.”

 

~*~

 

Everyone has fantasies of being unfeasibly courageous under pressure. Or in my case, of inventing some device so torture has no effect on me. But that’s useless when there’s two of you. When we got to the lab, the gravel-voiced man held a scalpel to Mandy’s throat to make me behave while he cable-tied me to a chair, and then to my throat until she was tied down too.

They arranged our chairs side-by-side and sat down facing us.

“I have bad news, Jane,” said the second man. My name in his mouth gave me a bad jolt. I’d never seen him before in my life. He had no distinguishing features apart from too-shiny hair, bright brown with a grey edge along his part. I decided I’d call him Bad Dye Job since I could tell I wouldn’t be getting his name.

BDJ put a large dog collar on the table in front of me. It was the one I’d made in high school. BDJ ran a finger over the flowers I’d painstakingly stamped into the leather. “Somebody loves their dog. Flora, right? That’s her name? Must have escaped from the backyard. Not much left of her. She met an 18-wheeler.”

 “We don’t live anywhere near the highway,” I said numbly. I was already shaking.

“No, you live in 14 Vautier Close. Funny thing, then, how Flora got such a distance.” He tapped my nose with his scalpel. “Perhaps it’s dangerous to know you.”

Fear knuckling my throat, promising the worst. “What do you want?” I whispered.

The other man spoke up in his gritty voice. “Your laptops. Your passwords. Your hard drives. Your memory sticks. Your passwords to the lab’s network, and the lab’s secure server. Any place where you’ve stored the data for the research you’re intending to publish. The names of anyone else that might have that data.”

Mandy was glaring at him, red-eyed. “You can destroy our research, but we’ll just do it all again.”

BDJ felt around in his breast pocket and pulled out a long grey hair, holding it up to the light. “Security in retirement villages tends to be quite slack, I find. And there are so very many things that old people can die of.” He held Mandy’s eye while she swallowed heavily. “And your brother Mike’s a very trusting boy, I’ve heard.”

I started to shudder uncontrollably. These men knew far too much about us; how Mandy’s witch-haired grandmother had been a constant in both our lives, after-school provider of tea and biscuits and questions and stories; how her whole family adored Mike with the soft eyes and broken brain. And Flora, it hurt too much to think what these men might have done to her. Her tail would have been wagging big hairy circles, she’d have grinned her goofy grin at them right up until—Please let them be lying.

And that was just a start. I had a sister, parents, a world of people that could be hurt.

~*~

 

For each file, BDJ made me go through the data tables and alter some of the values. They weren’t big differences, but—

“This data doesn’t support our results.”

He gave me a humourless smile. “I know.”

“But it’ll look as though we made them up!”

“It won’t be the first time researchers massaged their data to get results they want.” His voice silky smooth. Another humourless smile. “Welcome to academia.”

 I could feel the snarl on my face. Our branch of biological research is a small community, and within it we’d be forever known as fools at best, frauds at worst. “Nobody’ll ever work with us again.”

“You were made an offer. If you’d taken it, you’d never need to work again,” said our other captor. I’ll call him Gravelly because I hate him, but seriously his chainsaw voice was his only distinguishing feature; he’d blend in anywhere. Idiot. He didn’t know us that well after all, because this shining space of glass retorts and metal cabinets had always been our home. More than our home; our kingdom and our playing field.

“What else would we want to do except work?” I asked.

“Should’ve been less stubborn, then. Your work’s over,” said Gravelly.

There’s a kind of face that doesn’t spell hatred, but a kind of inanimate opposition. I couldn’t read whether Gravelly meant to kill us, or whether he simply meant that once he’d forced us to discredit our own research, we’d be unemployable. He might say either thing in the same flat tone.

“Every time you open your mouth, I’m more glad we turned you down,” said Mandy, catching my eye with an encouraging look. She knew I needed it right then.

The offer to buy our research had come in a month ago. For once I’d been the loose cannon blazing against good sense and practical choices. Sure, at first my ego had swelled up and strutted around, basking in the glow of our brilliant future. But we’d won prizes before. We knew the flush of pride and the long-tail descent into normality that follows a burst of fame. Before we signed on the dotted line, we thought about what would happen if we sold our rights to our research.

We’d have to stop doing it.

The contract had an annoying clause, obligingly pointed out by our supervisor, Brad, with whom we’d run a brushfire war of obstructive sexism since the day we enrolled. The fate of nations may have hung on the fact that he’d been such a total dick to us for years. It was fun to see him all stiff with jealousy about our success. Typically spiteful, he’d pointed out that one clause. “So girlies, I suppose you’ll need to find some other area of research…”

Delicious to reverse the spite. “We’re not signing. We don’t need the money, Brad.”

Yeah, it was a low blow. I’d like to say we were driven by higher ethics but obviously not.

So here we were with Gravelly and his fake-haired sidekick confirming our worst suspicions about the corporations behind the offer on our research.

“Buy it, patent it, bury it,” said Mandy thickly. She was crying. Rage-crying, actually. Impossible to imagine Mandy not doing science. “We couldn’t let that happen. The world needs these.” She nodded at our rows of tanks and jars.

BDJ yanked her hair. “Shut up! Do you know how ridiculous you sound?” His face had gone stiff; I wondered what was behind it. Contempt for people with high ideals? Or a more basic hatred towards girls too rich to be bribed?

“The world doesn’t need any more disruption. There’s enough to go round already,” said my captor.

“Who do you work for anyway? Big Plastic?” I asked. “You bastards, you don’t care if the world drowns in your products. You’ll just keep pumping them out until the whole world’s suffocating in it.” I waved at our Inspiration Wall, with its posters of net-strangled albatross and starved dolphins, and the ghastly photographic catalogue of things found in their stomachs. “Have you ever looked at a bird? Really looked up close? Or any living thing that isn’t a copy of you?”

Neither of them answered. BDJ shoved Mandy’s laptop under my fingers. “Get typing.”

Mandy kept sniffling. She was always mercurial in her thoughts, but it was frightening to see her emotions swerving all over the emotional graph like this. Too many data points. I couldn’t trust which way they were trending.

Something cold crawled down my cheek. The slow tears of terror, I guess, though I couldn’t really feel it, if you know what I mean. It was more something my eyes did in reaction to seeing that gun-muzzle-shaped mark on Mandy’s cheek where BDJ kept jabbing her.

“Stop crying. It’s never too late to change your major,” BDJ told me breezily. “Your parents put Letitia through dance school. I’m sure they’ll spring for a switch to an arts degree, kiddo.” He looked like a thug, but his sly sideways glance at me said I know everything about you. He poked Mandy with the gun again. “And if your family sells off their Bosch shares, you can afford to be a perpetual student the rest of your life, if you like. No need to work at all.”

“Bosch? Really?” said Gravelly. “Bunch of idealists like you? Don’t you know where they made their first millions?”

Mandy did. I’d heard her have more than one fight around the dinner table about it. Now her colour was high. “You don’t know what I believe!”

“After being forced to read your articles in the school journal, I’d say we have a good idea,” said BDJ, rolling his eyes. “Maybe you should go back to doing that. Your family could buy you a real paper or something.” Another jab with the gun, this time right up against her eye. My own eye winced shut in sympathy. “Though if you ever, ever write about what’s happened here tonight…” He let the threat stand, a solid wall topped with barbed wire that contained us all: Mandy and me and our families and everyone we’d ever work with or care about.

He went back to feeding me false data to enter into our research and I had to type it out, this time into Mandy’s laptop. He knew his stuff; the values he gave me were close enough to be plausible. But they’d never add up to the kind of enzymatic action we’d claimed. Our altered strains wouldn’t even be viable; the modelling would show bacterial colonies that flared up briefly before guttering out, choked by their own byproducts.

By the time I’d finished my wrists were rubbed raw by the cable ties holding them to the arm rests. Loose enough to type, not loose enough to escape. If I tried to wriggle, testing their limits, my captor kicked me in a tired sort of way, as if I was too much of an idiot to bother with.

“Now send your paper to the Journal,” said BDJ.

I wish this was the kind of story where I’d encoded a clever secret message to the editors at the Journal but it isn’t. I hit Send.

“All right, you win!” Mandy tossed her head. A beleaguered heroine of Hollywood’s Golden Age. “Throw all our samples down the sink!”

“No!” I shouted. Not for the reasons our captors might think. There’s such a thing as lab safety protocols.

Mandy didn’t care. She was egging them on with such a theatrical performance of despair that Gravelly started walking over to our bioreactor jars muttering, “It’ll be my pleasure.

I imagined our samples brooding inside the lab’s plastic plumbing and caught Mandy’s eye; she returned it with a look full of such feeling that our captors read it like a signal flare. Damn it, we’re such fools. But the thought of our mixtures eating the plumbing to lace, dropping and spreading onto the floor tiles, contaminating the soles of the cleaners’ shoes…

BDJ stopped Gravelly with a sharp word. “No. We don’t know how reactive they are, remember? We’ve got to kill it, not spread it everywhere. Get the mixture.”

Gravelly snapped open his briefcase and took out a bottle and an eyedropper. He snapped on some rubber gloves.

Mandy’s teeth made a fence of anger as she watched him open our breeder jars and drop pink liquid into each. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“We do. You’re having an unfortunate die-off.” He checked the jars with a glass-tipped probe and gave a nod of satisfaction. Somehow I had no doubt he knew exactly what he was doing. He waited a minute then tipped them all down the sink. The gleaming row of empty jars stank of failure. The heart gone out of the lab. “If your supervisors ask any questions, you know what to say. Cross-contamination, cascade effect. It happens. You had to flush the lot.”

“Brad’s going to love that,” I said bitterly. “Congratulations for making the biggest arsehole in bio research happy.”

Always that little people-pleaser in me, thinking I can loosen things up with a bit of humour. Even now.

“Rrrrrrh!” said Mandy, disgusted.

~*~

 

Once I’d changed the data on our laptops to Gravelly’s satisfaction, sent it to the Journal and transferred it to all our secure servers and data storage devices, BDJ stepped away from Mandy and gave an ostentatious knuckle-crack. “My time to shine.” He asked for my passwords; my fingers shook as I gave them. Once he was into the lab’s supposedly secure system, he hacked his way into the back end, making it look as though the changes hadn’t happened simultaneously. If anyone bothered to check, it would appear as though our findings had trickled through steadily during the time we carried out our experiment.

It was slow work. Gravelly stacked our jars in the steriliser and turned it on. We sat listening to it swishing while BDJ tap-tap-tapped on my laptop. The light was unchanging on the gleaming surfaces of our empty lab. It was impossible to tell how late it was, or how close to morning. Nobody walked past in the corridor outside. I’d be too afraid to call out if they did.

I say the lab was empty, the glass heart gone out of it. But it was absolutely full of my awareness of that gun. It even pushed its way into the spaces behind my eyes when I shut them.

They had a gun. Would they use it? In every spy thriller I’ve ever read, once the victims have given up their secret passwords, there’s no reason to keep them alive. Any minute now, BDJ would finish his work, lean back and say, Well girls, time to go for a little drive.

And we all know how that ends.

I sat there, not looking at the gun with all my might, and my thoughts flicked around in my skull like frightened fish. The thing is, did these men know about virulentis?

 

~*~

 

We’d been as careful as we knew how.

Not careful enough.

Our biggest ever fight was the weekend before our big national school science win, and it was over whether to make our presentation on sativa or virulentis. Common sense won out, and we left virulentis at home. Mostly because I’d grabbed the old beer fridge of my brother’s where we kept virulentis and its cousins and hauled it out to my car. Mandy kept yelling at me and trying to pull the fridge out of my arms. Both of us too heated to pay attention to the clatter from inside it, which (we admitted later) we fully intended to investigate once we’d stopped fighting.

But then Mandy’s grandmother intervened and by the time she’d got us calmed down we’d forgotten about it. Only to wake up in the middle of the night in our science fair hotel room with an identical clutching of the gut.

“Did you hear…?”

“You mean, when we were fighting?”

So there was that low level anxiety all the way home on the plane and back to my house. Mandy got to the fridge first. We stared at it. Then I stepped forward and opened the door. It opened without its usual crisp kiss of air released. Warm air came out, and a smell, sharply alive.

Mandy’s hand was at her mouth, knuckle-chewing frantically. I might have made some sound.

The inside of the fridge was eaten into a spongy lace of rotten plastic. Test tubes lay scattered and broken. The glass shelves had dropped off their sagging supports.

The fridge engine started up with a sick-sounding whine. I unplugged it. The plug felt hot and sticky.

“It shouldn’t survive at room temperature…” We’d been over this again and again on the plane home. We couldn’t seem to stop.

“We knew it would evolve,” said Mandy in a small voice. “If there’s one thing we know about it…”

“Just not this quickly.” I looked at our Swiss-cheese of a fridge. “Nuke it from space. It’s the only way to be sure,” I said, quoting Aliens.

Then we both got a shitload of industrial strength bleach and used it on the fridge, the room, our clothes and ourselves until our skin peeled off.

“Lesson learned,” Mandy said. Then held up a metal flask where she’d kept a sample of virulentis because she was Mandy and couldn’t resist.

“I’m thirsty.” Mandy’s voice broke a long silence.

Nothing. She tried again. “I’m thirsty. Please.” Her face had the shiny look of tear tracks hardened to a glaze; strands of hair stuck to it. She toed at her bag, which was leaned against her chair-leg. The metal drink bottle clinked and she nodded down at it. “Please.”

I probably turned grey.

She was brave. She was crazy. She wouldn’t look at me because my expression had given her away last time. This time I stayed neutral, turned half away.

“What harm can it do?” she asked. “I just need water.”

“Then you’ll need the bathroom. And you’ll mess things up trying to escape, and we hate mess,” said Gravelly.

“Please, just give her a drink,” I said. I don’t know when loyalty is stupid. I knew by the set of her head that I’d said the right thing; that she needed me on her side more than she needed, well, things we normally need, like self-preservation.

She nudged her drink bottle again.

Gravelly hadn’t advanced in his chosen career without a healthy dose of suspicion. Once he’d picked up the drink bottle and unscrewed it, he kept BDJ’s gun trained on Mandy while he held the bottle to her mouth. I could smell its faint scent. The men wouldn’t recognise it; they’d think they were getting a whiff of soap or perfume. They hadn’t worked with it for years, like we had.

I don’t know how she did it. I saw her jaw move as if swallowing. She made swallowing noises. We’d done everything we could to make it harmless to organic life, but judging from the way her eyes bulged, her mouth must sting like buggery.

Gravelly lowered the gun and put the bottle away.

Mandy coughed explosively. “Gah! It went down the wrong way!” The cough turned into a sneeze. Droplets went everywhere. All over her hands, all over mine, all over BDJ and his gun.

“Quit whining.” Gravelly turned away in disgust. He and BDJ sat at one of the tables to work, heads lowered over the screen.

Computer hacking’s not as quick as in the movies. Tap-tap-tap. An hour went by.

I wriggled my hands in their cable ties. The surfaces were pitted. They had a little give now. Mandy had her head ducked down so her hair made curtains while she drooled more spit onto her tied wrists. She was sweating, and now and then she suppressed a heave.

Her chair arms were melting.

Tap-tap-tap. It sounded like one of the keys were sticking. Any minute now they’d suspect…

BDJ pulled out his phone and made a call. “You there? Nearly finished. Yep. Come on in.” He gave his fingers an irritated flick after he switched off the phone. “What’s this sticky stuff?”

Everything happened at once. Mandy pulled her hands out from the ties that had softened to taffy. Gravelly’s scalpel was on the nearest table; she grabbed it and cut her feet free. As she stood to do the same for me, the men spun around from their table. BDJ’s gun was in his hand already, but his fingers sunk into the melting plastic grip. The barrel sagged as he took aim. There was a shocking noise. Bullet/splintered desk/broken glass. I swung my chair at him. Another shocking noise, crack! Chair/skull. BDJ fell in Gravelly’s path and they both tripped on the lab stools (We all do that sometimes. It’s the way the legs splay out). Mandy grabbed her bag and we ran.

I had my keys out and locked the door after us. It shuddered under the impact of 100kg of smoothly suited muscle. Another blow, and we could hear it begin to splinter. At the third blow, the lock groaned in its seating. We were flying down the corridor by then. Through the big double doors and out into the shadows of the night campus.

As we sprinted round the end of the building we could hear the low roar of a car starting up, the only one.

“They know where we live!” gasped Mandy. “Where do we go?”

I didn’t know either, but I took her hand and pulled her away from the broad walkway we were on, the obvious route to the main road. There are stairs and alleys between buildings, shortcuts only students use. We skirted the playing fields under a spotlight moon, and escaped into the streets of shabby shops that border the campus. Even here we stood out; there was no traffic, everything was shut. We trudged on. “God, I need a drink,” said Mandy. “I can’t get the taste out.”

“Did it hurt your mouth?”

We found a vending machine by a bus stop and Mandy swilled and spat, swilled and spat. I tried not to think of contamination. We kept walking, dragging our big pall of danger with us. We could be brave and clever all we wanted, but our families? My little sister? Mandy’s grandmother, the tale-spinner of our childhoods who’d told us hard work would win our heart’s desires?

Dawn found us on the harbourside beach. The loading cranes of the port loomed against the paling East like prehistoric beasts. Like a memory of things gone beyond returning. We sat with the sigh and rattle of shingle in the waves, and the hollow sound of plastic bottles dragged by the waves. There were so many of them, floating in the water and poking out of the shingle. The rising sun painted them with a tawdry shine. Plastic bags, bits of net, straws and ice cream tubs and takeaway containers.

We sat peeling the soles off our shoes. They’d gone soft and useless. God knows what the lab floor looked like by now. Mandy’s sneeze had sprayed a good deal of it. By now the plastic tiles would look like lace doilies.

If there hadn’t been a plastic-strangled seabird right there, and a hundred other seabirds wheeling above us with their lost cries, maybe things would have gone differently. But Mandy saw the bird, its feathers a miracle of design, its wing a sad beautiful curve, its eyes empty of the bright awareness that had made her a queen of skies and seas. Mandy looked at me, and I knew what she wanted to do.

“Bastards,” I agreed.

She threw our shoes into the water then waded in after them, unscrewing the cap of her water bottle. Virulentis halophilens. The fast-evolving strain that thrived equally in freshwater and salt.

 

~*~

 

It took a few years to reach the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Ships who sailed through the middle of the ocean returned full of tales about vast algal mats with filaments trailing to abyssal depth. Slowly the shameful floating archipelagos of plastic vanished. Our plastic-eating bug moved between ports on ships’ propellors, spreading with the news of its existence.

Then it evolved, of course, making life’s second great leap from sea to land.

And so here we are in a new world of glass and iron and wood, of ceramic and natural fibres, as though we were all in a great Steiner school, learning to live again. Everything is more difficult, and so much convenience we took for granted is gone forever.

Above us, the skies are filled with birds who loft in the wind and plummet to eat their fill of the fish-enchanted oceans.