Out There, Somewhere by John Morano

Author:John Morano [Morano, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grey Gecko Press, LLC
Published: 2018-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

Maputa left SeaTopia. She was gone. Her body functioned, but her consciousness—her attention—was suspended, muted. She placed herself somewhere else using her surroundings to create an illusion, just as the man-tide hoped the visitors would do. She emerged from her cave and hovered in the water of the tank. Assuming the position of feeding and prayer, she did neither.

Maputa became coelatonic, dreaming her way home, back to her sheaf. She retrieved moments in her life that she’d already lived, sometimes recreating them exactly as they’d happened before. Other times, she’d alter a response that was made or an action that was taken and create fresh, new memories in her mind that weren’t quite real.

But Maputa didn’t concern herself with that. There was no law, no ethic, no imperative that demanded she face the reefality of her situation. The coelacanth would deal with SeaTopia on her own terms. Her thoughts were the one thing the man-tide couldn’t control.

Maputa ate almost nothing. She choked down a scrap here and there to keep her heart beating and her gills breathing. She had the ability, although the man-tide was unaware, to slow her metabolism down to a point just above dormancy, a type of hibernation. Maputa allowed herself a thin strand of hope anchored deep inside her mind. She didn’t recognize it. She didn’t think about it. But she wouldn’t permit the shard of hope to drift away.

Though she was physically alive, Maputa wasn’t healthy. Yet being so close to death somehow made her visions more vivid. At times, the canth couldn’t decide which was real, the vision or the tank, as she waded back and forth between the two.

Perhaps she’d been attacked by a great white shark and was lying unconscious on the bottom of her sea, imagining all of this. Maybe she’d perished in the man-tide box with the lantern fish and was entombed in the mesh, buried at the bottom of the sea. Nilmah, Mombassa, and her children might be circling around her at this very moment, trying to wake her up. But no matter where her mind carried her, she eventually returned to the tank. In the end, it was inescapable.

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