Isn’t the deep sea so delightfully strange? 173Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡlMNJ6kJav1
NOAA deep sea explorer, Sam Cambio
Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans. Jacques Cousteau
Adam and Eve were real, just not biblical. The sod-busting pioneers were dropped here from another Garden of Eden deep in space to begin seeding this Garden of Eden like other Goldilocks orbs had been successfully seeded throughout this universe. The male and female aliens looked just like us; or should I say, we look just like them, because we are them—mere castaways on our own little planet, mailed here from a far, far, faraway zip code.
The immigrant life-forms sowed everywhere else had always taken root and flourished; in Earth’s case, the unprecedented corruption and the seeds’ murderous, destructive rampage began almost immediately. What caused this rot to our fellow hairless bipeds?—a first. Was it a genetic mutation caused as they entered an atmosphere of mostly oxygen and carbon dioxide that had been tested three times, and was rated as ‘optimal’ by our aeronauts before the transplant? Something in the water that, likewise, was checked and rechecked beforehand by our smartest hydronauts? Something they ate?
Members of The Counsel of Humans on the home planet were vexed. Although the knock-offs on Earth had only been fruitful and multiplying for only a few millennia, again, non-biblically, they had made a mess of their Garden of Eden. It was time to push them along, ecologically—again!--or let their fellow Homo sapiens whither and die and go extinct because of the damage they had caused, and chalk it up as “well, ya can’t win ‘em all!"
The democratically-elected, altruistic main human spoke out with compassion, an abundant trait on all the other Goldilocks orbs, pleading to the other rational people on the committee to keep pushing Earthlings along. To try to get them to finally maybe better themselves. “The knuckleheads are part of our galactic family, you know,” the flesh-and-blood leader exhorted. “We need patience.”
“Yes, but in a mere 6,000 years, they've melted the place, destroyed most of the indigenous flora and fauna, and murdered themselves by the millions in every way, shape, and form. Will they always be the black sheep of the family? Can they ever be reformed?” a concerned citizen asked politely from the gallery. “I’m very sorry for interrupting.”
“I say we cut bait,” another person doing her civic duty chimed in, after waiting for her turn to speak. “Those dim bulbs are giving the rest of us humans throughout Creation a bad name. Que sera, sera. Sayonara, auf wiedersehen, adios, and good-bye, as they say down there. Thank you for patiently listening, everyone. I shall now return quietly to my seat.”
“Citizens. Citizens,” the main human said at the podium just above his normal voice, trying to quell the near-riot in the overhead bleachers. “Let’s all just take a moment to breathe, and deliberate and ponder the situation, rather than get triggered by our emotions. As a humble servant of the people, my honest assessment is that we continue sending down more emissaries. Keep hoping the old ‘monkey-see-monkey-do’ thing will at last take hold.”
“Balderdash,” a councilperson interjected quietly, rising slowly to her feet in a pique. “We’ve sent down seeds from our best minds; from our most peaceful; from our most creative, to instruct them on the way they should go, but all that got corrupted along the way by the very same naked apes we came down to save: DNA samples to try to poke them forward, extracted from the loins of the hybrid parents of Socrates, Jesus, Newton, da Vinci, Einstein, Steve Jobs, so on and so forth. Our Craigs.list is long; the value, negligible,” she thundered in a forceful whisper. “I love you all. Stay beautiful,” she said, recomposed, and tiptoed back to her chair with a smile.
“Agreed,” a colleague on the bench stood to say, lowering his voice for emphasis. “Our finest sperm and eggs wasted on . . . on . . . on . . . the trifles of the delinquent,” he nearly audibly gasped, his heart flustering at 63 beats-per-minute. “How many more chances can we allow them?”
“I say, give them one last shot at environmental redemption and planetary survival. If it doesn't help this time, well then, I guess that branch of the family tree will be no more,” another admitted, ashamed of their only failure. “But let's not go the insemination route, this time. Let’s make it obvious, like we did in the good old days. Dress up as aliens, drop down from the skies with all the bangs and whistles and lasers and anti-gravitational beams, impart our knowledge to them—again—and be worshiped as gods from on High, whatever they are. We grab their attention, impart what they need to know, and return to the skies. They do seem to be in awe of some members of their own race, like rock stars and actors. Party on, Garth.” He left the stage in levity, something people do sometimes to break the stress of serious discussion.
There were a few minutes of deliberating silence before the head engineer swiveled towards him, almost interrupting, and replied, “Sorry, my dear Sir, but the old ‘UFO floats down-to-save-Earthlings-again ship has sailed.”
“Since when?”
“Since Euclid’s Greek mom and daddy from the M51 galaxy fruited one night in a Thermopylaen mud hut.”
“Come again?”
“We thought the seedlings were ready for math, reason, and logic, so we sent down an equation specialist to deliver a counting system to the Sumerians, a walled-in gang, aloof and suspicious of other aloof and suspicious walled-in gangs on the planet. Well, these computations, given sacredly to improve the place, have been prostituted like everything else they’ve been handed. Simple adding and subtracting learned in Mesopotamian kindergartens eventually led to the fall of Babylon, caused by structurally unsound construction principles, by the way, because sound construction principles had not been learned yet, not because of the biblical debauchery one of their gods called sin.
“This failure led us to save their heinies again by teaching them Euclidean geometry, which led to the creation of the ‘zero’ invented in the 8th century by the Arab mathematician, al-Khwarizmi that eventually reached Europe, a larger walled-in landmass of aloof and suspicious people. This knowledge led to further scientific discoveries that eventually launched engineering, which launched the Industrial Revolution, which launched precipitous climate change caused by runaway greenhouse gasses—and bombs that can blow the whole place to smithereens as well as our flying crafts. They have become quite solicitous and paranoid and will shoot us down first, ask questions later.”
“And that’s why we’ve graciously gathered here this afternoon,” said the concerned main human. ‘’‘To be, or not to be’, to quote a guy who learned how to write great stuff from one of our own. ‘That is the question.’” He then delivered the full soliloquy like Sir Lawrence Olivier, another “natural” with a stage mother and a long-distance father, once did.
Everyone in the assembly rose for a standing ovation in full appreciation of his Shakespearean eloquence, sat back down politely, and turned their undivided attention back to the head engineer. There was not one cough or a single clearing-of-the throat echoing through the cavernous assembly room. Not one rustled paper.
“If not by air, why not try by sea, again?--but not like the feeble attempt we tried some five hundred years ago,” the head engineer asked the other much subdued humans. “Yet another one of our forefathers’ attempted failures, mating some of our younger gals with the blue planet’s dolphins to get their attention to save the planet. Mermaids! Ha! Sailors simply ‘waxed their peg legs’, continued sailing west, dropped anchor, then plundered, decimated, and profited off two undiscovered land masses. Thus, a whole new world of walled-in gangs, aloof and suspicious of other aloof and suspicious walled-in gangs was created and had now gone global.”
A whispering hullabaloo broke out, people remembering the embarrassing experiment from their fact-based history books.
“Yet, I believe we can improve upon their idea—to wit: rather than sending our budding flowers down to mate with dolphins again, we fuse the sea creatures with the smart-as-whips little Grays from the next planetary system over. I’ve already borrowed a cup of sperm from the main alien and some dolphin eggs from the Pacific, so once our hybrid tadpoles are up and snorkeling, all we’ll have to do is release them into one of the planet’s oceans. A pod of them. Maybe that will get their attention—creatures so out-of-this-worldly weird that they definitely won’t want to wax their peg legs to. Creatures so convincingly alien that they’ll go viral. As influencers with billions of followers, our emissaries might finally convince our dying cousins to get their ecological shit together. That they represent Earth’s Last Great Hope. It will be a stunt bigger than the ones Greenpeace stages!”
A councilperson asked if she might speak, was obliged, and replied robustly, “and we can send these merliens, let’s call them this time, down in USOs. So far as I know, our trailer-park cousins haven’t yet created a weapon that evaporates their own seas. And it would be a pretty safe, unassuming release as they explore the moon and Mars more than they do their own deep-blue waters.”
“Waters of bleached, dying coral, floating islands of discarded plastic the size of one of their divisions of aloof and suspicious people they called Texas, oil spills. They just don’t care,” another broke in, then apologized profusely for her rude interjection.
Now the head engineer spoke again. “Once our pod finds their fins, they’ll frolic and swim near shorelines. Every human down there has a cell-phone with a camera, another Euclidean by-product gone mad, so it won’t be long until our merliens will be seen, recorded, then posted all over social media. And their urgent message to repent, again non-biblically, for the arson of their own home, and then, hopefully, their collective sudden reversal of climatic fate that might save the hapless losers one last time.”
The great hall erupted in an unanimous acceptance of hands raised quietly; the oceanic plan was put into oceanic motion, and the good folks on the home planet went back to doing what made them happy and healthy; enjoying life.
Meanwhile, back on good old Terra firma, the pod of bulbous-headed bottlenecks found their fins after being let loose in the Mariana Trench, then swam up for air and splashed and frolicked in the archipelagic waters off the coast of Indonesia. For less than ten minutes.
The merliens, wearing goggles to keep the salt water from stinging their eyes, pirouetted out of the waves in unison when the first ship approached, much like their predecessors did all those centuries ago, trying to be seen. Trying to be recorded. Trying to get posted to social media and get their message of ecological salvation told. They twisted down into a net. The commercial fishermen, troweling only for bluefins, tossed everything caught in the line that were not bluefins into an onboard grinder to be used as chum, so enjoy your next tuna melt, damn you, reader, because now we’re doomed!
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