Mermaid 8

By: KeikoJade

I lay in the lagoon and watched the crescent Moon traverse the night sky.
The arced sliver of bone light shared the sky with countless stars. The
water was warmer than the cool air.. A storm had raged all day, and
scrubbed the air and sky clean.

A month had passed since I found this island. It had become my home in
heart and soul. But in my mind I knew I'd have to move on. It was becoming
difficult to see myself working with Julia. After my talk with Sarah, the
urgency I felt to be with my family had waned. It hadn't disappeared. I
didn't want it to disappear. I couldn't let it disappear, because I didn't
know what it would mean if I did.

And, even though it was only a two-day trip to get back to our meeting
place, the idea of leaving my island, or any land, for the deep waters was
intimidating. Crossing the Pacific, at least halfway, had failed to cure
me of my fear of the deep. Living in shallows provided comfort and safety.
I'd nearly died in the Pacific, and had the scars to remember the
experience by. Also, my left shoulder still ached if I used my arm too
much while swimming.

I couldn't appreciate the strength I had lost on my journey until I
assumed life on the island. Here, food as well as rest was plentiful. I
gained weight back, and my mood changed as well. I felt more positive
about things. At the same time, the idea of deepswimming seemed to cause
more anxiety than it did the first time I considered it. I guess at that
time I was only scared of the unknowns. Now, I was scared of the knowns,
which were more tangible. Before heading out my main concern had been
being turned into food. Now, I knew the main concern was not being able to
find food.

As I pondered the sky, I realized that I had more will to stay than will
to go and meet with Julia again. Our failsafe for rendezvous had been to
delay the meeting by another two weeks if I missed the first, and to
repeat every two weeks thereafter. I had to make a decision now or wait
another two weeks. I decided to sleep on it.

In the morning, I found no urge to return. So, I started my day. Hunt,
swim for fun, follow some reef fish, grab a bite to eat, sunbathe, then
meet Rico and Sky and play tag and bask and screw off in general until it
was time for dinner.

After a month with the pair, I had learned a lot about their language.
Though it consisted of clicks and squeals and beeps, a good part of it I
could understand. I recognized queries like: "where are you? hungry?
tired? play? where prey?" And I could distinguish confirmations for each
of the queries. Then they made sounds sometimes just for the act of it,
kind of like humming, or singing. Perhaps some of the sounds they were
making were nonsensical even to one another, yet at the same time they
were merely accompanying each other with the sounds of their voices. In a
way people do that as well, when they talk with one another about
trivialities. The content of the speech is in some ways a lot less
important than the act of speaking and hearing a friend's voice.

Also, I wasn't sure if I was entirely reading their language, both verbal
and body, or if I was picking up things mentally. I had communicated with
Glubok telepathically. I was able to influence the psyches of human
beings. I hadn't tried to influence or manipulate the psychs of Rico and
Sky, out of respect. I was sure I could. I tried to communicate with them
with my mind. I would think of queries I knew they understood, and imagine
the sounds they made for them, as well as the idea and emotion behind
them. It didn't seem to yield results. But, they were masters at reading
my emotions, moods, and disposition without me broadcasting them. They
intuitively understood when I wanted company or solace. They seemed to
know when I was hungry, or tired, even before I knew I was. I wondered if
they were perhaps recieving my thoughts, but I was unable to recieve
theirs.

I was screwing around, floating in the lagoon, and growing a bit bored,
which was unusual. I decided to focus on imitating the voices of my
friends. I'd only tried to speak underwater once, but to no avail. Perhaps
it just took time, which I had plenty of.

I tried to tense my vocal cords as I pushed water through them while
exhaling. I practiced this for hours without feeling any effect. I
continued into the afternoon. I didn't feel a thing, no vibration, and
certainly no sound. However, something kept me going. At first I thought
it was stubborness. But then it seemed a bit more tangible, and I realized
it was a kind of instinct.

I kept at it, pausing only for meals and sleep. After two days with no
results, I quit. My stubborn instincts were defeated. But after skipping a
day, I was again drawn to trying. I was hovering in the lagoon with my
face to the surface. Without having the slightest expectations, and fully
resigned to a disappointing result, I exhaled water and tightened my
throat. To my amazement, I heard a subtle rasp, quieter than the sound of
a weak breeze pushing through palm leaves. However, I had definitely heard
something. Elated, I repeated the sound.

The idea of speaking with Rico and Sky on their level kept me going. After
a week, I was making a sound like a missed high note from an oboe.
Progress was slow, but seemed to be accelerating.

During a lull in playing with my two friends, I surprised them by making
an oboe-ish squeak. I only had a miniscule amount of pitch control, and it
was an embarrasingly tiny sound. It was more like a rat squeak than
anything comparable to what Rico or Sky could produce. The effect,
however, was instant. They both turned to me rolled against me, and
squealed and beeped uncontrollably. Finally, they grew silent. I took this
as a request for an encore. Again, I produced a miserable little squeak,
and they were ecstatic.

My voice grew stronger. Not only were the notes I could make longer and
louder, but I felt a great amount of vibration in the hard tissues of my
throat when I made them. The highest range was established first. Then I
concentrated on going lower and lower. Soon, I could drop from an oboe
sound to low clarinet range. The sounds were inhuman, in that they were
not altered by movements of lips or tongue. In fact, the sounds I was
making would be disturbing if I heard them come from someone else. I tried
speaking words underwater, but it wasn't any use. The noise was definitely
emanating from my throat as opposed to my mouth. Thus, the flow of water
over my tongue and lips couldn't change the sound. Also, in water, I
couldn't move my tongue quickly enough to make clicking sounds, like a
hard 'K'. And the ability to make a 'TH' sound as in 'the' wasn't there in
a recognizable form, missing along with 'Z' as in 'zoom,' or any other
consonant or vowel. I found that it didn't matter whether my mouth was
open or closed when I was vocalizing. Water I was exhaling to produce the
sound could travel through my nose or mouth. Thus, I could sing with my
mouth closed.

I was also unable to imitate the clicks my friends made. I was altogether
ignorant of how they made their sounds. I once had my hand on Rico's
forehead when he was chatting, and could feel a fair amount of vibration
there. But other than that, I didn't know how they produced their sounds.

After a month I was able to imitate all their non-clicking squeaks and
beeps, in both pitch and volume. This facilitated our communication
tremendously. I had also grown more attuned to our sounds. Concordantly,
my vocabulary expanded greatly. Once I got past the shock that Rico and
Sky used a language as diverse as that of humans, I was able to learn it
faster.

To my delight, I found that submarine vocalization had benefits outside of
communication with dolphins. In a sense, I was able to sing. The company
of my own voice was welcome indeed. At first the songs, produced without
the manipulations of the human mouth, sounded obtuse and silly. After some
practice I found I was able to provide enough control to the songs that
they carried their own tunes. After some time, my ears grew accustomed to
my own sounds. I'm the type of person who likes to sing in the shower, or
when they are in a good mood. I was happy to regain the ability to do so
in my own environment.

The other benefit took longer to appreciate, but turned out to be
incredibly useful and important. It became the most important undiscovered
talent to date.

For no reason in particular one day, I was circling the reef slowly,
swimming with my eyes closed to better appreciate the feel of the water
slipping over my body. I was only a few feet from the surface, and the
sun's rays were warm on my skin. I was in an incredible mood, and was
singing a wordless tune. Since I was near the reef, the unpleasant thought
of bumping into it was strong in my mind. The coral and limestone were as
sharp as razors. But I found that I instinctually could feel my proximity
to the reef. Not only that, but I could feel its contours intimately.
Shocked, I stopped singing and opened my eyes. What I saw of the reef
matched what I had felt of it. Again, I closed my eyes and hummed a high-
pitched note. I could feel the reef, more than see it. It was as if the
knowledge of the shape of the section of the reef exposed to me that would
be gained through eyesight was instead dumped straight into my brain by
the sound I was producing.

This was fascinating. I started swimming with my eyes closed while
navigating through song. I moved slowly, expecting to collide with the
reef, but I guided myself perfectly around the island. I was even able to
locate the entrance to the reef's tunnel, and navigate it into the lagoon.

As I entered the lagoon, I realized that it was a bit harder to determine
its size and the location of the sands at its circumference. The sounds I
was making were absorbed by the sands more than they were reflected.
However, when I opened my eyes, there I was, in the middle of the lagoon.

Soon after, I discovered that it wasn't the sound I was making that gave
me this sonar, but reflections of the sound I made bouncing back to my
ears. Because sound travels rapidly through water, I had to be pretty far
from something that bounced back sound to actually detect the echo.
However, the images the sound gave my mind definitely did not appear until
I could detect the echo. At close range, the song and its echo reached my
ears nearly simultaneously.

My new talent had plenty of room for exploration. I realized that my ears,
which were so attuned to sounds in the water, were also perfectly attuned
to recieve data from my own voice. My brain was wired to interperate the
sounds. I was just never able to produce sounds before, so natually this
talent lay dormant. Of course people can judge the size of a room they are
in while blinded by the sound. This talent was similiar, but much
stronger.

I was no longer blind in the dark. Locating prey was easier than ever. I
didn't have to come into visual range with something before I could
determine its size. Thus, it was easier to determine whether I was heading
toward something I could eat, or something that could eat me. I was able
to detect land rising from the seabed before I could hear the ocean
interacting with rocks or coral sand.

I soon became so accustomed to singing and sounding that I did it
unconsciously. I gained new confidence in deep waters. Looking back, I
couldn't believe that I had crossed the Pacific without this abilitity. It
had been like a blind and deaf man trying to walk across a city at rush
hour.

My knowledge of the dolphins' language grew exponentially. I also devised
a way of making clicks, by snapping my fingers. However, it was difficult.
The amount of strain I had to put on my fingers to make them audibly snap
underwater was uncomfortable after one click, and painful after a few.
Thus, I decided to abbreviate my communications. Without clicks, my
vocabulary was limited. I could understand far more than I could speak.
However, I was able to communicate at a comfortable level with my friends.
They seemed to grow accustomed to my click-less method of speaking. I
could chirp a word that they also added clicks to, and even without the
clicks they understood.

Once I grew comfortable with their language, the thing that amazed me
about the difference between humans and dolphins, was that there
essentially was no difference. While I had learned, I had effectively
unlearned, as well. The emotions and feeling the observer feels the first
time they witness a dolphin are far more genuine than he or she is
programmed to believe. I knew that people could easily anthropomorphize
animals. I wrestled with this, wondering if I was attributing too much
humanity to them. Finally, I simply couldn't see it that way. It wasn't
that I was giving the dolphins human characteristics. It was that dolphins
and humans share characteristics. I realized that the emotions and spirits
we feel are not exclusive to our species. Though I was skeptical when I
first realized this, it became something in which I fully believed.

I learned also that we share good and bad characteristics. Rico and Sky
were best mates, but sometimes Rico was aggressive toward Sky. The humping
I had witnessed was always initiated by Rico, whether Sky felt the same
way or not. Often he never let Sky reciprocate. Sometimes when they were
hunting, Rico would wait until Sky caught a fish, and then grab it from
his mouth before he had a chance to eat it. This was apparently for no
reason other than to show him who was boss. Sky would sometimes fight
back, but only as false protest.

On a pleasant afternoon, the three of us were basking after eating. They
slept in an odd way, and it took me awhile to recognize when they were
doing it. They would just kind of lolligag as if in a daydream. What
confirmed the fact for me that they were sleeping, though, is that it was
the only time they would actually shutup. I felt I was becoming a creature
of the wild, but I definitely appreciated silence more than they did.

I was just beneath the surface of the waves, dozing, when I felt one of
them bump into me. I heard Rico's voice, very soft, and very pleading. I
just pushed him away, but he was then under me, behind my back. I felt
something hard and ridged hook onto the back of my dorsal fin.

"Don't like," I said. I couldn't reach around to push him away, so I
started finning. That's when his jaws came around my left shoulder, above
and below my armpit. He bit down hard. The image of the shark nailing me
on the arm filled my mind, and Rico started humping against me.

"Don't like!" I shouted, and started swimming hard. His teeth dragged over
my arm. There was no way I could fight him. He was four feet longer than I
was and had to weigh around 600 pounds. In a few short seconds, I felt his
hot ejaculate shoot across my back, up into my hair. I pulled my arm away,
and he let go. I swam hard to clean myself of his cum. I was furious. I
waved my hair in the water and coughed in fresh breaths.

"Bad!" was the word I shouted at him, though I was thinking more along the
lines of "Fucker!"

I turned to him. His eyes were glassy with pleasure. "It was fun," he
said.

No sooner had he toned it did I hear a cluster of powerful clicks that
hurt my ears. Sky came out of nowhere and broadsided Rico with his beak.
Rico shouted confusion for a second. Sky chomped his jaw together, making
an unbearably sharp 'crack.' That was kind of like throwing down a
gauntlet at an opponent. Squealing, shouting, and screaming, they launched
into each other. I had seen them play-bite before, and kick at each other
with their tails, or play-ram one another, but this was a real fight. The
fury of it scared the hell out of me. I didn't feel like I could survive a
single serious bite, and being rammed by one could probably kill me. I
fled back to the lagoon at full speed.

My shoulder hurt again. Rico had broken the skin, and his conical teeth
left long rake marks that bled. They were a little bigger and deeper than
cat scratches made by a cat with two dozen claws on each paw. The
scratches weren't bad, but my shoulder was damn sore again.

I was pissed at Rico. I had waved him off a few times when he was amorous,
and he seemed to be able to take a hint. This time, though, it was almost
like rape. There was no permission given on my part. My anger was hard to
contain.

However, as the sun set, and I gained more distance from the event, it
became harder to blame him. I was good freinds with them. The only thing
lacking between us that Rico and Sky shared was sexual expression and
sharing. That was fine for me, because I didn't fully understand my own
sexuality. But perhaps Rico couldn't understand why I'd protest his
advances. I was also growing worried about them. The last I'd seen them,
they were relentlessly beating the crap out of one another. However, it
wasn't like they had knives or clubs, so I figured they'd fight out their
aggression and quit when they were tired, just bruised and battered.

Regardless, I decided it was time for a break from my flippered friends.
Now would be a good time to fulfill my committments to Julia. More than
three months had gone by. Many opportunities to meet with her were missed.
I wondered if she was still bothering to show up. I didn't really feel bad
for letting her down, but I did feel bad for not feeling bad. It felt like
I had made the commitment in an entirely different state of mind. I did
have growing concern about the plight of my family, though. That concern
wasn't so abstract. However, it was obvious now that my first act upon
reaching Hawaii shouldn't have been to seek out a human. Of course,
hindsight is infamously perfect.

I gathered my things together. As I donned the belt and scabbard, I had
the same sensation that I had when I would gather my backpack to leave
home on a hike. I started feeling excited about the trip. I started
singing the tune to "On the road again."

After two days, I arrived back at our meeting place. I noticed, however,
that the water here was somehow irritating. Also, it was noisy. According
to my map, the area in which I had made a home was a nature preserve. Our
meeting spot, however, was surrounded by the city and tourist beaches.
Back at my home, I had spent months without ever hearing boats, or
smelling diesel fuel in the water. My nose and pallette had grown clean.
Here, there was constant motor noise, and my skin felt itchy. Visibility
wasn't as good, either.

The worst thing, though, were jet skis. Their obnoxious whine never left
my ears. How on God's green earth anyone found it enjoyable to run around
the ocean on those irritating pieces of high-speed trash, instead of
taking in nature on a surfboard or a sailboat, I had no idea. Perhaps I
was turning into an old krank, but their sound was maddening! Also, it
became almost impossible for me to use song to locate things. There was
just too much engine noise. I couldn't even sense a limestone cliff unless
it was within reach of my hand. I had to use my eyes a lot more, like I
did before discovering my sonar. My neck grew stiff from all the swiveling
it put my head through.

The noise even made it hard to think. It really angered me. I hovered
below our meeting place rock, eating a lobster, and hoping she would hurry
up and arrive. I hadn't used my watch in three months. However, it still
worked, and I was here, on a weekend, three and a half months since the
last time we met.

Time dragged. At least at night the jetskies died off. But every morning
they'd come back. I really wanted to grab one of those jetski riders off
his machine and scream in his ear until he realized how annoying he was. I
fantasized about shooting the jetski with a high caliber rifle so that the
engine would die quickly, leaving only silence. Maybe the rider's brain
would suddenly wake up without the noise rattling through it. I could see
the jetski through an imaginary rifle scope. I put the engine housing in
my crosshairs, and pulled the trigger. The heavy bullet would kill the
engine. The thing would glide to a stop, and the rider would be standing
there, forced to appreciate golden silence. In my fantasy, this would
teach him a lesson. However, in reality, he'd probably produce an air horn
and blast it to sound help. Or, just pull out a cell phone and start
complaining to someone.

Most of Sunday passed. I didn't see a boat stop above me. I was starting
to hope Julia wouldn't come by. I just wanted to get back to clean ocean.
However, I heard the thrashing of a propellor late in the afternoon. The
boat it pushed appeared over my head. The engine ceased. An anchor plunged
into the water, and then descended very slowly, as if hand-lowered. That
was my sign.

Suddenly, I found that I really did want to meet Julia. I surfaced near
the stern. She was there, wearing a one-piece bathing suit, looking cute,
and lowering the dive ladder.

"Hey you!" she cried, happily.

I had exhaled water coming up. Now, I took in a deep breath of air. It was
then I realized that I hadn't bothered to breath air for weeks, maybe
longer. I hadn't even been sunning on my beach in that time. The air felt
strange - vaccuous and empty. As I breathed in it felt as if my lungs
remained empty. The feeling was so alien that it felt as if I was a human
trying to breath water. I started hyperventilating and felt dizzy. Julia
must have read my expression.

"Are you ok?" she asked.

I felt as if I should go back underwater and catch my breath before I
passed out. Just as my vision started to tunnel, and bright stars
appeared, I started to recover. I found myself gripping the dive ladder.
After a few minutes, I felt normal again.

"Are you alright?" Julia asked.

I tried to speak. Nothing came out. It felt as if air wasn't substantial
enough to move my vocal cords. Again, I tried to speak. Nothing - not even
a rasp of air. I could only sigh quietly. It suddenly dawned on me that
the last time I had vocalized in the air was before I started learning how
to do it underwater.

I looked up at Julia, mute. I simply shook my head. I looked away as my
mind raced. I realized that I hadn't so much been training my vocal chords
to work underwater, but re-training them to do so. Now, the thin air
wasn't tangible enough to vibrate them. It was perhaps possible to re-
train them again for use in the air. However, the benefits of sonar and
communicating with animals would then be lost again.

I bit my lip and looked at Julia. I put my hand over my throat and shook
my head.

"You can't speak? Unable to?" she asked.

I nodded.

"Why?"

I shrugged my shoulders. There was no way to explain without words. Then,
I motioned for something to write with. She produced a pen and writing
pad. I really couldn't get out of the water that much here. There were
other boaters, and those annoying jetskis. I hiked myself up on my elbows
as much as I could, and wrote.

"I learned how to speak underwater, but it seems I can't speak in air
now."

I showed it to her.

"Damn," she said. "Well, I don't know what to say, but... Where have you
been? Oh man, there's so much I have to tell you that it's not funny. Holy
crap, I was worried about you."

I had to let her talk on. The frustration of not being able to speak was
so strong that I barely heard her. The waves were pretty strong that day,
and without climbing fully out of the water it was impossible not to get
the paper wet, at which point the pen would not spread ink.

"Hey, I think the coast is clear enough," Julia said. "Come up in here."

"What?" I wanted to ask. I looked at her quizzically.

"Just look," she said. I pulled myself up on the gunwales. There was a
large vinyl lounge chair, shaped like a bent banana, with a slit just the
right size for my dorsal fin to fit into.

"That was custom built for you," she said. "It was so hard to get both you
and I comfy last time."

I laughed silently. There was no one in obvious sight. I hauled myself up
on the gunwales. Julia positioned the chair and helped me scoot onto it,
and helped my move my dorsal into its slit. Then, I eased into it. The
chair bent my upper body up at a comfortable angle, as if I was in a
reclined La-Z boy chair. This boat was slightly larger than her last, and
there was room for my tail and fluke. The chair was very soft, as well. I
felt like I could fall asleep in it. However, I was somewhat immobile. The
mermaid portion of me was also visible to anyone who could see us.

Julia produced a large cotton sheet. "Put this over you?" she asked. I
accepted it, then threw it into the water and soaked it. I pulled it back
onto me, and covered myself up, wrapping it over my breasts and tucking it
behind my back. I gave her a thumbs up.

I also realized how I was now icognito. Unless someone looked directly
into the boat and saw me without the blanket, they couldn't tell me apart
from a human. This was thrilling! Now, if only I could speak!

Being out of the water allowed me to write freely. After so long, the pen
felt clumsy in my hand, and my penmanship needed practice.

"Show?" I asked.

"The show is on, if you want to go ahead with it," she said, her eyes
gleaming. "The footage you provided us with was impressive to say the
least. We have a budget of $30 million to start with."

"Who pay?" I wrote.

"An independant producer and director," she said. "For movies, not TV.
That's the other thing. We're going to make a movie. Or, you will alone,
depending on what you want to do. It's just going to be a movie from your
perspective. No plot, but you'll have to get a lot of good footage. You
know, stuff only you have access too."

"Can I still do it alone?" I asked.

"Yeah, you can," she said. "It's all going to be determined by how much
trust you have in us. Thirty million gives us, for our purposes, unlimited
resources. I've scouted ships that can accomodate you, the way you want to
live. On those ships we can edit the footage you bring us, transport you
to different locales, whatever."

"What kind of ship?" I asked.

"A research vessel we can lease," she said. "It's designed for studying
cetaecans. It has a moon pool." She reached into a bag and produced a
folder. She had brought out a lot of stuff for me to review. The folder
was an overview of the ship. The moon pool was a direct access to the
ocean through the ship's bottom. I could come and go as I pleased,
unobserved by anyone outside the ship.

"Basically, we can use it as a floating movie studio," she said. "This way
you would have access to unlimited power and good cameras."

"What is other option, for me being independent?" I wrote.

"Other option is this," she said, handing me a folder. This one detailed
plans for several different devices I'd need to carry out tasks on my own.
Julia let me go through the information. Together, the devices formed a
backpack that looked like half of an egg. According to the specs, it was
neutrally bouyant and airtight. The exterior and interior of the egg were
covered in photovoltaic cells. Inside the backpack there was room for two
cameras, one a hand-held, the other a lipstick camera I could wear with a
headband. These cameras were waterproof and recorded digitally. However,
the computer they used, and the satellite dish they needed to upload film,
were only water resistant. I'd have to use them on terra firma, and keep
them in the backpack while at sea. It didn't seem very plausible. Also,
the part about it being neutrally bouyant wasn't really true, because the
shell couldn't compress. It was probably neutral near the surface, but
floated deeper down. It was also only airtight to 500 feet, and the
cameras were only good to 2,000 - both well inside my operational
envelope.

There were also limitations with the battery time on the cameras, and the
amount of time needed for the devices to soak up photovolatic power from
the sun was very long. Though these things were custom-made and state-of-
the-art, they really weren't what I expected. The satellite upload and the
computer were another story. They could access the internet and phone
systems anywhere in the world. That meant I could at least use email,
since using a telephone required a voice.

I pretended to go through the information while I considered my options.
Why would I do this? I was becoming happy in the ocean. The only things
tying me to human life were a rapidly-diminishing feeling of loneliness,
and the obligation to my family.

As I pondered this, I heard a jetski approaching. The mosquito-whine sent
shivers down my spine. It was driven by a young guy who was obviously
flexing his muscles as he drove near us. The thing buzzed our boat, and he
let out a shout as we rolled in his wake.

"Loser," Julia snorted.

I watched him blaze on across the water. He had no idea what the noise of
that machine did to the creatures below the waters. It blocked sonar, it
rattled their skulls, it made the water oily and polluted. All from a
simple joyride.

I then realized that he was a reason for me to undertake this project.
While there were constantly environmentalists talking about the ocean, I
had never really listened to them. I had never cared. Now, I was part of
the ocean, and without realizing it, I had become a die-hard
environmentalist. I cared for the waters. My perspective might be a means
of helping people appreciate nature, and care for the ocean.

I glanced at Julia. She was reviewing paperwork that looked like legal
stuff. It reminded me that I would be engaging in something for profit.
Would my message be lost by the ones who carried it? Maybe she and her
investors didn't want to producing something that had a message. Hell, for
all I know, they could take my footage, add some animation, and create
"The Little Mermaid 5." Without the advice of a lawyer or an agent, it was
also possible that I was set to be massively exploited. Beyond that, there
was always the question of entrapment - literally. The degree to which I
had started trusting humans so quickly, after my initial paranoia, was
startling.

_A lot to ponder,_ I thought. However, I figured it was now or never. If I
spent more time in the wilderness, I might decide to never come back. Or
Julia's interest and faith in me might run out.

I wrote on the notepad. "The boat option is best," I said. "I trust you."

She looked me straight in the eye. "Thank you. I won't betray it."

I nodded my head slowly, then smiled.

"Well, Ytha, there's a bunch more stuff. It's all legal things. However, I
have procured for you, or am ready to, something you'll need, and that's
an agent. Also, I have a lawyer for you."

"It's ok, I trust you," I wrote.

"Well, again I thank you, but this is for something different. You see,
there's a way to get you legally recognized as a citizen of the United
States. If you're a citizen, then you'll be afforded legal protections.
You won't have to worry about becoming someone's pet project, or both. If
someone advocates for you, they'll be advocating for a legal entity."

I nodded. I hadn't expected this, or even considered it as a course of
action. The logic of it was strong. I just wondered if it was possible for
me to become a citizen of the United States. I wasn't familiar with any
laws dictating this privelage only to the human species, but I knew squat
about legal stuff.

"That sounds great!" I wrote. "How can we do this?"

"It's complicated. First you have to seek asylum, and have a residence,
etcetera, etcetera, however, if you become a celebrity through this movie,
things can be sped up drastically."

The sun was starting to set. "Have you heard from my family?" I wrote.

Julia nodded. "Your sister and I have had a lot of talks," she said.
"She's been a little dubious now that so much time has passed, but she's
pretty convinced. In any case, she wants to meet you. We can fly her out
here."

This made me feel warm. I was suddenly impatient to start working.

"When do we start all of this?" I asked.

"Whenever you want."

"Immediately," I scribbled. "What to do first?"

"Well, first, we have to assemble a crew. One condition of the funding is
that you have to meet the investor, personally. Other than that, you
really don't have to meet anyone you don't want to. The ship can serve as
a home base for filming. You never even have to enter the moon pool, if
you don't want."

"One thing I need learn," I wrote, showing her the tablet. Then I wrote:
"Sign language."

Julia laughed. "I agree. Your hand must be getting tired."

I nodded, smiling my laughter instead of laughing aloud.

I looked around. The sun was setting. Sitting in the comfortable recliner,
I felt peculiarly human. For some reason, I didn't mind.

"One other thing," I wrote. "How'd you get this great chair!?"


TBC