Science

He noticed that new creatures were emerging in the process, slowly being pulled up from the depths by his experiment. There were known leviathans: Kraken, Charybdis – and there were unknown ones with strange names: Horta Nakka, Sonoris and Astarma.

At first he was excited. The ocean was yielding new, hybrid creatures as a result of the collapse.

But then they noticed him.

Horta Nakka was a shark with the face of a man, it rose out of the sea for a second, then dropped back. “Have mercy on me,” it shouted. “I am but a creature of the abyss, a devourer of memory. A destroyer of history. No one knows the voices of the seafarers of old any more.”

Sonoris hovered over the waves – its body that of a crab – its face that of a woman. He had come here to reveal, but Sonoris took away from him. The methods and the data. Not a word came from it.

Astarma, the most noticeable, the strangest of them all, had a gelatinous, bottle-shaped body. It seemed to be submerged in the sea and visible in the sky at the same time. It changed him, although he could not measure any differences.

But he was changed. In his small dinghy – with all those expensive apparatuses – in the middle of the ocean.

Astarma said to him, “There is no reality. There is no man.”