Look, I didn’t set out to try to sabotage my mother.

I mean, technically my mother.

Doctor Naomi Wallace, Distinguished Professor of Marine Biology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Jane Goodall of whales. Queen of the aqua-mentary. Ruler of the field of undersea ethnomusicology.

She’s the kind of mother who casts a hell of a shadow over a son trying to make his way in the same field of science. And let’s be real. She was more of an on paper mother, really, if you take into account the amount of time we actually spent together.

But regardless of how Naomi chose to live her life…it wasn’t my intent to sabotage her illustrious career.

Then again, I also wasn’t trying to do her any favors.

THE EXPEDITION

The interview room is dark. Air conditioning cranked. A square of light glows.

On the video monitor, three gray craniums are floating in semi-darkness. Dim shafts of light scintillate over a monotone blue-black landscape, casting writhing shadows across the wrinkled concavities etching three tremendous cerebrums. These mottled heads are floating straight up and down, each the size of a one-story building.

And inside each massive head is a brain—an alien mind we are seeking to communicate with.

The three sperm whales are suspended tail-down in the Pacific Ocean. Asleep. Our custom drone has moved over them, controlled from here. The drone trails an underwater speaker combined with a hydrophone.

“We’re in position,” I say to the donor. “Loading cetacean large language model.”

Prescott Marsh is a polished middle-aged guy wearing a bespoke suit. He smells like old leather, and I can’t tell if he’s sixty or forty. He’s got the kind of money where it starts to occur to a person that they need a museum named after their family. Or at least some species of dinosaur.

He also happens to be my mother’s largest private donor.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” he asks. “The expedition sets off in two weeks. I don’t have any time to waste.”

“Well, I’m not totally sure,” I say. “No scientist would claim to be sure. But I’m reasonably sure. With more data, I’ll be even more sure.”

Prescott doesn’t look convinced by this.

The grayish globular mounds keep floating, suspended in silence. From the bird’s-eye-view perspective of the drone, it looks like it could be starlight playing across the fleshy lobes.

What alien dreams lurk in those folds of gray matter?

“Yes, well,” continues Prescott. “This is intriguing, but you do know that every slot on the project is filled. That includes the rather low-level intern position for data analysis.”

“Right. But I’ve got something that could put this expedition in the history books.”

“That being?”

“This project—”

The monitor stutters and flashes.

From above we can see the entities floating in the void. The black of the water below them is vast. It’s terrifying to look at—even through a remote feed. And yet, this is normal for the creatures lurking out there.

They thrive in the vastness.

“Well? What are they doing? Nothing?”

I realize Prescott is a money man. The way I’ve seen him speak to other donors, you’d think he was a researcher himself. I wonder if he actually believes that he’s some kind of expert.

“They’re asleep, sir,” I say. “That’s why they’re in a vertical posture.”

“Well, let’s wake them up,” he says.

I motion to the transmit button. Even I know that it’s important to let the donor push the button. Give the rich people a toy, take their money.

He taps the button.

HELLO WORLD.

The flutters and squeals of a non-human language emanate from the hydrophone projector. I can imagine those sound waves spiraling out into the darkness—organic medleys of sound, codas of language. At times, they sound like mechanical, stuttering clicks. Then they segue into melodic flutters, or the drawn-out moans of a beautiful, nameless song.

All of it alien. All of it strange. All of it generated by a home-brew generative artificial intelligence that I’m praying doesn’t embarrass me.

Slowly, the massive floating forms begin to move. A few clicks are audible. And then a world of sound erupts from the pod. Flowing. So much more complicated than our little synthesized chunk of coda.

The algorithm thinks.

“What’d they say?” asks Prescott. “Can’t we translate?”

I tap a button. A synthetic voice speaks out loud. It’s the large language model on our side of things, the human side.

The moment of truth.

“Skibidi,” says the voice. “Hear you loud and clear, no cap!”

What?

“Er, what?” asks Prescott.

Oh, dear god no.

“The, uh, human language model is trained on chat logs from a video game called Fortnite,” I sputter. “I didn’t have access to a corporate or military training corpus so I went with, uh…free. Educational.”

“I believe I’m stupider for having just heard that.”

“It should get better with more data,” I say.

Even I don’t believe it.

A pinwheel of clicks and squeals spiral back toward us. Some of the gray shapes are shifting, turning in place.

“Vibing fam,” says the synthetic voice. “Let’s squad up.”

I slap the laptop lid closed.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I really don’t know why I thought this would work. In theory, it sounded…uh, you know.”

And yet somehow Prescott is smiling at me, his thumbs hooked into his pockets. His small gold-rimmed glasses are glinting in the azure light of the monitor.

“Do you know how the esteemed Dr. Naomi Wallace convinced me to fund her incredibly expensive expedition?” he asks.

“To study cetaceans.”

“Yes, generally,” he says. “But specifically. Her goal for this endeavor is much more grand. Naomi is gathering evidence of a cetacean civilization. A spoken language history. A culture that has been passed on for thousands of years. Verbally, through language. Can you imagine? And yet Dr. Wallace never dreamed of the possibility that one day we could simply ask them.”

Prescott stands there beaming. Shakes his head at the sticker-covered laptop.

“It’s a hard problem,” he says. “It won’t be solved from a distance. But the whales were interested.”

“That’s…that’s right,” I say. “This expedition is unprecedented. A cross-species migration occurring once every four hundred years? This data could provide the Rosetta Stone of whale language. And someday, all animal language.”

Shit. That sounded good.

I continue while Prescott is thinking.

“Give me ten hours of interspecies hydro-recordings, let my algorithm interact in real-time with them, and I’ll give you the ability to speak to whales.”

Time to land the hook.

“It’ll be a discovery made on the Marsh expedition.”

Ooh, too far.

Now the guy is looking at me like I might be full of shit.

“Well, trust me that I’m very sorry to say this,” he says, and my breath catches in my throat. “But that sounds…skibidi. You’re in.”

ON BOARD

There’s a hell of a storm coming.

It’s the first thing I’m told as I board the ship. Our expedition is sailing into the heart of a cyclonic system forming in the Gulf of Alaska.

Truthfully, it’s hard to feel worried.

The R/V Aanaruaga is rated Polar Class 5, with a huge blue prow that can break ice up to three feet thick. The huge vessel is designed for ultra-quiet operation to avoid disturbing fish and marine mammals during survey expeditions. It’s got no fewer than six on-board laboratories, wet and dry, as well as a manned submersible lab with a direct-to-water moon pool embedded in the heart of the ship. The hugely complex rear suite of winches and load-handling cranes are for bringing on the submersible. There’s even a helipad on the prow deck, used exclusively for a fleet of customized drones.

Given all that, the ship is surprisingly utilitarian. Simple. Efficient.

The walls of each cramped corridor are unadorned, just beige bulkheads that were painted god-knows-when. There’s a thin layer of mealy brown carpet under our feet when a simple mix of sandpaper paint won’t do the trick. Just about everything is metal, clean, blunt and smells like bleach, engine grease, and salt spray.

The vessel is owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, in collaboration with Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Scientists, top to bottom, and it shows.

My “stateroom” seems to have time traveled here from the 1960s—a closet-size space stuffed with two bunk beds and a fold-down desk. The rails on the bunkbed and the small porthole window remind me this is a deep ocean expedition. That and Igor, an actual hot-shit academician from Eastern Europe, who is no doubt wondering why some kid is taking up precious space on a trip as important as this.

Every inch of the ship is spoken for, yet somehow my mother still doesn’t notice me for three days.

I don’t know why I’m surprised.

My childhood was one of neglect. Dad was a sperm donor. A mathematician that Naomi met at an annual conference. All I really ever knew about him was that he was a lanky Frenchman and that he was very good at theoretical math.

Him not contacting me was an unspoken part of their agreement.

Even so, I followed his career. He wasn’t half-bad. Theoretically.

You’d think with the amount of work it takes to be a single parent that I’d be a top priority. But it turned out that I was a lot like the grants my mother was such an expert at obtaining—more of a four-year project. By all photographic indications, we were joined at the hip for the part of my life subject to childhood amnesia. During the rapid neurogenesis that occurs at that age, kids’ brains don’t form long-term memories.

Kind of a shame, not going to lie.

The only joyful moments I do recall? A trip on a boat. The spray of salt, slate waves rimed in sunlight, and the glimpse of a rubbery gray fin. I believe it was a right whale.

Ironic, I know, given how conflicted I feel about Dr. Wallace.

But there it is. Mother chose whales, and then so did I.

Let’s not look too hard into why that is.

It takes the all-knowing matriarch three days to realize, or at least acknowledge, that her dear—and only—child is on board the same two-hundred-and-fifty-foot research vessel.

I watch each briefing from the very back of the science operations center, making it unnoticed through the welcome speech to our thirty-odd scientists and two morning briefings. Naomi has a projector set up to run slides detailing our mission goals and progress. Even out on the open sea I can hardly believe the details of this literal once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

The Convergence. That’s what she named it.

We’re traveling to see an ancient, cross-species migration of millions of tons of marine mammal to a single point in the Pacific Ocean—a sweet spot located south of the Aleutian Islands that hang below Alaska’s belly.

I’m intimately aware of Naomi’s theory—having watched and re-watched my mother’s latest documentary on my phone while waiting for my training data to compile. She is building on the results of yet another Prescott Marsh-funded expedition. This time, he sent researchers to study the Indigenous peoples of the Aleutian Islands—searching for evidence of a sunken city.

Prescott Marsh has one other passion: anthropology.

In particular, petroglyphs. Symbols left on cave walls. They don’t even know the name of the pre-Aleut tribe that left them. Possibly the Unangax, who lived here long enough ago that the climate was different. Even the stars were in another part of the sky, thanks to precession, our planet’s twenty-thousand-year wiggle along its axis.

The sea was important to the Unangax people. Their lives depended on understanding, following, and harvesting marine mammals. And I’ll admit, some of the anatomical drawings they left are surprisingly accurate, based on the prehistoric megafauna that was lurking around what we’d eventually come to call Alaska.

But the Convergence is their oldest, most complex, and most sacred petroglyph. The most famous one, as well. Spectacular, really.

By the light of a torch, the rock flickers with the depiction of an amazing event. The first Convergence ever witnessed, described back when no man-made light pollution interfered with our connection to the stars. When humankind faced off squarely against nature.

The Great Convergence. A mass feeding event caused by a cyclic confluence of sea currents. All coming together to create the perfect all-you-can-eat buffet for every major marine mammal.

It’s the Unangax star maps that tell us how often the event occurs: approximately every four hundred years.

Approximately ten thousand years ago, a small group of human beings on seal-skin kayaks repeatedly witnessed the convergence of thousands of whales from sixteen to twenty species—several of which are now extinct.

The whales came together. To this feeding spot.

The Convergence was sacred to the Unangax. Not a time to hunt, but a time to give respect to the natural world. To bow to the spectacle of an alien civilization that was far bigger and older than their own.

That’s what my mother claims.

But you know what it really was? A lot of stupid whales eating a lot of stupid krill. And in the process—generating a whole lot of precious data.

MEET MOM

I’m coming out of the submersible room when she corners me. Dr. Naomi Wallace, in her signature shawl and cardigan, her glasses thick and intimidating, the grand matron of the marine biological sciences—the real-life version of a portrait that has graced the back cover of so many best-selling books.

“Hi, Mom,” I say, by habit, heart thumping inside my rib cage.

“Hello, son,” she nearly spits. “Who allowed you on this ship?”

“Wow,” I say. “I’m doing fine, thanks.”

“I didn’t ask how you are. I asked who let you on board this research vessel? Your name is not on the manifest. It would never have been allowed. Nepotism.”

“Yeah, I know,” I say. “I used another name, and I approached the donor directly. And if you think I’m going anywhere, you’re fucking mistaken.”

She flinches at the curse word. Doesn’t correct me though. We both know she doesn’t have the parenting capital to ask me anything.

“So, it was Prescott,” she says. “I should have known he’d be willing to step out from under my control for this project. He even insisted on coming along himself. Probably trying to find a way to claim credit for the discoveries we’re about to make.”

She looks me up and down.

“I have no idea why our donor would make space for a computer scientist, among a dozen marine biologists and cetologists.”

“I’ll tell you why,” I interject. “Cross-species communication. Between us and them. But also, between whales. My theory is that they dumb it down for each other. So, this will be the simplest version of their languages we’ll ever see. In our lifetime, at least. And I’m going to get the data firsthand.”

“How do you intend to collect this data?” she asks.

“Sound,” I respond. “These animals spend most of their lives in the midnight zone. You’ve seen how they group together in the exact same orientation at a thousand meters down. Synchronizing their feedings. Their surfacing. Communicating the whole time, lighting up the sea with clicks and buzzes. Information—transmitted in the pitch black depths—”

“Yes, yes,” she cuts me off, impatient.

Naomi steps back, reassessing.

I know there are no questions coming about my life, much less how I’m doing or anything as quotidian as that. Watching her mind work, I know she’ll be thinking about one thing—how is this going to affect the course of a long and illustrious career?

“What’s done is done,” she sighs. “Stay out of my way. Tell people I’m your mother if you wish, it doesn’t matter to me at this point. But remember…

“Do not. Interfere.”

I manage to look her in the eye and flash an unconvincing smile.

“I’m just here to do my science, Dr. Wallace,” I say.

“Well, I hope you get the chance,” she says.

That’s a surprise.

“Why?” I ask.

“Storm’s here,” she says. “Time to get busy.”

THE STORM

Look. I want to tell you the Great Convergence was an amazing sight. That it stirred the spiritual foundations of my soul. But really, it wasn’t. And it didn’t.

Not from the surface, anyway.

What it looked like was a frigid patch of open water with no land in sight. A churning mass of nothing underneath. An occasional majestic fin or tail.

The glimpse of a bumpy, blubbery lump of flesh swirling just beneath the surface.

What was really catching my eye was the monster cyclone charging in from the horizon to engulf our vessel. The anvil-headed clouds looming over a flat, endless expanse, laced with silent streaks of lightning. That’s what put a warm lump in my stomach and quickened my breath.

That, and the screaming drones flying low over my head.

Each the size of a small car, these custom research drones are designed to land on whales as they breach to gently attach suction-cupped sensor packages onto their skin. As one drone returns, the other takes off. A small group of scientists on the deck is busy outfitting new sensors as fast as they can—before the storm stops us.

It has the air of Christmas morning. Or a feeding frenzy.

All the data you can eat.

I’ve got an unusually good view, crowded onto the bridge along with the captain, the first mate, and a helmsman—along with a few people who I don’t even know what they do, and a whole lot of complicated-looking instrumentation.

Standing near the back of the room, I have a view of the entire bow of the ship through a wide row of slanted metallic glass windows. Over at midships, I notice a couple of crew in gleaming raincoats struggling to doublecheck the lifeboats. Curious.

“Watch it!” shouts a voice.

A speeding black blur streaks past the windows, clipping the narrow metal balcony out front. I hear panicked shouts from below as the out-of-control drone twirls violently down, rotors spraying wreckage as it destroys itself on the deck.

The captain calmly turns to his first mate, whispers a few instructions. As the first mate opens the door to leave, a swirl of rain violently spatters my face. The other crew return to work—charting the path of this Arctic storm, trying to figure out the safest way out.

Meanwhile, I hear my mother’s voice over the intercom.

Naomi is speaking from the bowels of the ship. Somewhere down there, it sounds like she’s continuing her research on the family dynamics of cetaceans. Because of course she is.

Out the front windows, the prow of the ship has begun to rise and fall up to three stories over each terrifying new wave. Sheets of rain sweep in from the endless expanse. And to think the world is perfectly calm only thirty feet below us. Up here, it’s becoming a raging gray nightmare.

“Stay the course,” says the staticky voice of my mother. “That’s what we chartered this ship and its crew for.”

“I hear you, ma’am,” says the captain. “But it’s my job to weigh the risks. We’ve got unpredictable winds, sixty-foot breakers, and it’s going to get worse. Thanks to the submersible and its moon pool, this vessel has a high center of gravity. One rogue wave and we could be in serious trouble.”

Wrong answer. I actually find myself cringing. Nobody stands in my mother’s way when her research is at stake.

“No, sir. Risk assessment is not your job. How could you possibly weigh risk versus reward without any domain knowledge as to what we’re witnessing?”

“Ma’am—”

“Send the crew and passengers to the top deck, closer to the lifeboats. Until then, leave me to do my research. The Convergence is well underway, based on hydrophone activity. An unheard of cornucopia of science is happening. Someday, you’ll tell people you were here to witness this.”

The captain pauses, scans the eyes of his crew. From here, all they see is the view from inside a washing machine. The slate skies have blended with the ocean to form a wall of gray liquid.

“Yes ma’am,” says the captain, shutting off the intercom.

The fear in his voice gives me pause. And yet.

Despite everything, I am deciding to head down to visit my mother in the submersible lab. Because if I don’t collect my data now, there won’t be another chance—not in this lifetime, anyway.

It takes a few minutes to realize Prescott is following me.

I’m down two stories into the vessel, palms flat on the sweating metal walls to steady myself as the ship violently tilts. I hear a shout of pain from behind me. Turning, I see Prescott, all decked out in brand-new, high-end sportswear, clutching his elbow and leaning against a pipe jutting from the corridor wall.

“Hey,” he calls. “Slow down!”

“What are you doing down here?” I ask.

“I just wanted you to know,” he says. “I always knew who you were.”

I blink at this.

“Then why’d you let me join?” I ask.

“I did it for her. For your mother.”

“Okay,” I call. “What’s that got to do with me? Or my research?”

Prescott clings to the door while the ship does unimaginable things in three-dimensional space. With a shaking hand, he fixes his little golden glasses.

“Christ,” he mutters. “You’re both the same, aren’t you?”

Prescott takes hold of a door, preparing to head back out and up.

“Help your mother,” he calls. “Find that Rosetta Stone, Mr. Wallace. Make contact.”

Prescott slides through the doorway and out of view.

It’s the last time I’ll ever see him.

MOON POOL

Mom is in the submersible lab. It’s a dimly lit, gymnasium-size rectangle carved out of the heart of the ship. The center of the room shimmers with an open swimming pool, called a moon pool. It looks down on a calm version of the same water that’s raging up top. One end of the space is taken up almost entirely by a round-eyed submersible, held in place by creaking chains. As we ride the waves, the moon pool is remarkably stable, held down by the weight of the ship and sheltered from the wind.

Still, it’s nauseating.

“Naomi,” I call. “They’re preparing the lifeboats. It looks bad.”

“Look at this, Marshall,” she whispers. “Look at this data.”

And now I see it. The full gamut of information pouring in from the whales that have been instrumented by drones, along with recordings from hydrophones that have been planted on buoys around the site. All of them are pulling in data, a firehose of information spewing into our hard drives.

It’s stunningly beautiful.

I see underwater images of graceful mammalian shapes, contorting through the depths in balletic dances accompanied by glorious whalesong. So many species, so many modes of communication. All of it playing out like an oceanic opera.

“Jesus,” I muse. “This could run my algorithm.”

Naomi shoots me an annoyed glance.

“Prescott told me about your interview. If the algorithm doesn’t work already, why would it work now?” she asks, full of the old confidence in my intellect that I remember from my youth.

“Scaling,” I say.

She cocks her head at me.

“My algorithm scales rapidly with more data. And data, of all kinds, is expensive. It’s almost impossible to find a shitload of examples of cetaceans communicating with each other. Much less across species.”

“So, you came all this way, on your mother’s research vessel…”

“Correct. For the data,” I say. “Of which, we have already collected a—what’s the scientific term?”

“A shitload.”

“That’s right, Mother. A whole shitload.”

“You’re really serious,” she says. “When did you get interested in this?”

“Around my twelfth birthday, when I realized large language models were all essentially the same thing, and that data sets would be the next gold rush. The more exotic, the better.”

“Is that when you instrumented our whole house with sensors? Tracking your nanny and the house cleaners until they asked me to remove it all?”

“Oh, you remember seeing me that year?” I ask.

That one stings. There is a silence. I assume it is a stinging silence.

“Do you know what I remember from that year?” she asks.

I don’t honor that with an answer. Still, I’m feeling my throat constrict a little. She’s clearly forgotten that she forgot my birthday that year—kind of an exponentially hurtful lack of sentiment. Yet, my mother did give twelve-year-old me carte blanche to purchase several thousand dollars worth of sensors. And I learned some really interesting information about the double life that our housecat was leading at the time.

“I was in the field, Marshall,” she says.

I can tell that Mom is seeing the memory in her mind right now, as we speak, instead of, say, her son blowing out twelve birthday candles.

“We were off the Pacific coast,” she continues. “Tracking a pod of offshore orca. The usual grouping. About thirty. A couple matriarchs. Some young males. Mothers and their juvenile offspring. They were hunting, which is what orcas mostly do. It was all looking very tried and true, as I had followed a similar pod the year before. Until…”

I’m trying not to be distracted by the way the water in the moon pool is sucking in and out. Or the distant moan of wind and thudding vibrations running through the bones of the ship. Luckily, the ship is built for this.

I reach out to grip a grab bar beside the built-in desk.

“Okay, Mother. What was the super important thing you found?” I ask.

“They ate fish.”

“My childhood,” I say. “And you found out orcas eat fish.”

“That’s right, child. They ate fish. And the group I’d seen before had a diet consisting of marine mammals, including seals, dolphins, other whales and so forth.”

“Fish and mammals,” I repeat, my eyes going dead. “Fascinating.”

“Marshall, these two groups of orca were genetically of the same stock. The same species. But they spoke different languages. They had entirely different cultures.

“The mammal eaters didn’t speak much except for logistics. Scouting. Coordination. They needed to be quiet because they were hunting highly intelligent prey. The fish-eaters, though. They had ten times the number of utterances. They played, son. I swear I could hear them laughing. Their carefree lives were spent chasing fish, uncomplicated—a simple prey that doesn’t hunt you back.”

Despite myself, Naomi can see the interest in my eyes.

“So yes, my son,” she says. “I do understand your interest in this data. And in fact, I insist that you load it into your little program. Because believe it or not, you and I are interested in the same thing.”

Her eyes are twinkling. This is what she was made for. My heart is pounding.

“Don’t smile at me like that,” I say.

It was all I could think of. To hurt her. She may be right about the whales. But this woman doesn’t deserve to see a smile of mine.

This woman who is my mother looks very small to me right now, sitting in the blue light of the computer screen. Wearing a shawl, clinging to the keyboard, her face pale from motion sickness. I’m starting to think there is nothing in the world that could tear her away from the chase, from this unending quest to accumulate more knowledge.

Of course, I’ll never know.

Because this is when I register the strange sight of the water in the moon pool emptying out, turning at an angle and spilling itself across the laboratory floor. As we lean back against the wall, I catch my surprised mother in my arms. I hold her steady as we watch the ceiling tilt impossibly until it has turned into a wall.

Briefly, I catch sight of the horizon through the swimming pool-size hole in the bottom of the ship. And then the Arctic Ocean comes rushing back in a frigid tidal wave.

TRAPPED

It takes a few minutes of panicked scrambling before I realize what just happened. Some obscenely large wave has just pitched our monohull research vessel straight up and down, allowing water to flood into the moon pool—and offering a brief glimpse of the world outside.

Subsequently, the stern of the ship plunged straight down into the water, trapping air toward the bow, and leaving the moon pool twenty meters below the surface.

And that’s where the R/V Aanaruaga chose to stabilize.

Our ship has technically sunk, but for the moment it remains floating with its nose canted in the air. My mother and I are trapped in the heart of the vessel, the floor slanting away from us into sloshing, ice-cold Arctic water.

Emergency backup power is somehow still working, bathing the room in an eerie reddish glow. The computer is even on, bolted to a workstation attached to the wall above the waterline. The same can’t be said for the submersible, which is sunk deep at the far end of the room.

“Mom?” I pant in the blood-red light. “Mom, are you good?”

“Marshall,” she responds. “I am okay.”

“I can’t hear anything,” I say.

The hull of the ship is deadly quiet. Three hundred million dollars, upside down in the North Pacific. The time to get the hell out of Dodge was apparently a while ago. I should have bailed when I saw them checking lifeboats at midships.

Instead, I got caught in a game of chicken with my mother.

And then, there it is…faint. The squeals and clicks of a whale. Acoustic targeting. We’re in the middle of the Great Convergence. The subjects of our study must be outside. Inspecting the suddenly overturned ship.

No doubt they’re curious about their mammalian cousins who are about to drown or freeze to death or asphyxiate inside.

“It’s you and me, Mom,” I say.

I can hear the gentle slough of air escaping the room. I’m watching the methodical creep of rising water. The weight of the ship is forcing the air up and out through every little crack.

We’re sinking. Slowly, but surely.

“Mom?”

This hard-as-nails scientist is still mousing away on some piece of overturned equipment. Straining. Not asking for help.

“Are you seriously ignoring me?” I ask.

“I’m not ignoring you, son. I’m busy,” she says.

“Busy doing what?”

Pausing, she looks at me in annoyance. Her upper lip is moist, eyes hollow and glinting in the emergency lights. She’s got the computer case in her hands. I can’t believe the determination packed into this woman.

“I’m trying to get this computer upright and online. And as a matter of fact, I could use your help. We need to check ship diagnostics. The data feeds.”

“You want to gather data?” I ask, my voice hollow in my throat. “We’re dying. Did you notice the water rising? Our air escaping? The ship has fucking sunk. And you want to listen to whales?”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

“I understand perfectly. You ignore me my whole life, and now you’re going to ignore me during my death, too.”

The computer slips out of her hands and thunks onto the wet floor. She yanks her hand back, cradling a cut. And suddenly, this woman who used to seem all-powerful seems frail. Vulnerable and helpless and afraid.

Without a word, I yank up the computer case and lay it on the slanted desk surface. My hands go to work booting up the PC on backup power. The database is local, so the system should work, for whatever that’s worth.

“I don’t know what else to do,” she says.

I keep on working, head down.

“I never knew what else to do,” she says, looking out at the destroyed room. “Life is so long. It’s hard. And this is the one thing that has always brought me joy. Joy, honey. Do you understand? How rare that is?”

I don’t respond to that.

“You don’t understand,” she breathes.

“Of course I understand, Mom. Why do you think I spent the last eight years in graduate school? Did you think I did that to impress you? Or to piss you off?”

I glance at her, and she looks away.

Of course that’s what she thought.

I snort.

“It’s the song, Mom.”

Slowly, she turns to me, eyes wide and shining.

“It’s the song, right?” she says. “The whalesong.”

A smile is starting to grow on her face. In spite of myself, the same smile is growing on mine too.

“It’s like listening in on a conversation between aliens,” I say.

“Or angels,” she says.

“Same thing, technically.”

The computer boots up. Mom pushes me away and starts pawing through the different menus. Checking ship diagnostics. It’s all offline. The expedition is over. Our ship is upside down and sinking.

I watch the realization settle over her.

“Mom,” I say.

She doesn’t respond.

She wraps her cardigan around her shoulders tight. Fumbles about trying to tie the sash closed. Her hands are shaking.

The air is still bubbling away. My fingertips are tingling. My breath coming quicker.

“Mom,” I say. “Look at me.”

When she turns, I can see she’s about to lose control. Her arms come out from her sides. It takes me a second to understand what’s happening.

She needs a hug.

The matron of the family. The great scientist. Conqueror of the sea. Principal investigator.

I give my dying mother a hug.

And as I squeeze her, I notice one thing active on the monitor. The moon pool hydrophone—an underwater speaker and microphone combination sensor. It’s a single blinking cursor. All that’s left of this great expedition.

Except…

“Mom,” I say. “Maybe there’s a chance.”

WHALESONG

“Yo let’s drop in hot and get this dub, fam!” says the computer in a curiously polite, synthesized voice.

My god.

The look on my mom’s face is heartbreaking. I can’t help but burst into laughter.

“This is artificial intelligence?” she asks. “Is it going to analyze data or should I get it a Mountain Dew?”

“It’s all I could afford. Video game chat logs. Anonymized, of course. But this is the human side. How it learned to speak English. Try to ignore it.”

“You said human side?”

“Yeah, the other side of the training corpus came from you.”

“From me? I don’t have anything to train an artificial intelligence. Just ten thousand hours of whalesong…oh, you didn’t.”

Grinning, I exhale and I can see my plume of breath. It’s getting cold without the heaters, even as our air disappears. I can’t hear any knocking from anywhere else in the ship. The whale noises have gone away.

“I did,” I say. “I trained it to recognize whalesong. And not just recognize. Synthesize.”

“You want to talk to them?”

“That’s right. Maybe they can help. Alert someone that we’re here.”

“Absolutely not. I won’t play recordings. It’s unethical.”

“What? Why?”

“Our recordings predominantly originate from deceased relatives of the pods we are communicating with. How would you feel if an alien ship came down and played your dead grandmother’s voice to you?”

“Uh, terrified,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“I mean, she wasn’t very nice—”

“Regardless. You get my point.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t a recording. This is a fully synthesized voice that none of these whales has ever heard before.”

Mom considers this for a moment.

“Fine. Turn it on,” she says. “Turn it on, now. Choose blue whale. That will carry the most authority with the most whales. They often co-migrate with other species. And, you know, they’re really really big.”

I shrug and type in the transmission.

HELLO WORLD.

Somewhere below us the translated human words are pumped out of an underwater speaker into the middle of the great convergence.

We wait. Nothing.

<SEQUENCE TIMEOUT>

“So much for that,” says Naomi.

“It worked. They’re just not answering. Why do you have to come at everything from a position of authority? Maybe a different species. Something not so intimidating as a blue fucking whale?”

“Fine, make it an orca,” she says. “They’ll often lead other species to fish. Smart, coordinated, respected.”

I type in the changes, feeling my pulse in my ears.

HELLO WORLD.

We wait. Again. Nothing.

<SEQUENCE TIMEOUT>

For a moment, I sit and listen to our labored breathing.

“I guess we’re going to die, Mom.”

“No,” she says. “This is going to work. This has to work. We just need to put ourselves in the mindset of these animals.”

“Empathy with whales,” I mutter.

“That’s right,” she says. “Who are we addressing these messages to?”

“Whoever,” I shrug. “I don’t know.”

“We need to address the matriarch,” she says.

“Coming from you, that’s not a surprising thing to say.”

My mother frowns at me.

“These are matriarchal species,” she says. “The older females rule.”

“You should put that on a T-shirt, Mom.”

“Maybe I will, son,” she says. “Just type it.”

HELLO. WORLD.

Slowly, the AI begins to decode the sounds it is hearing.

…what is it?…

…who is it?…

…human thing…

“Holy shit,” I whisper. “They’re talking back.”

My mother’s face falls into wonder at hearing the synthesized voices. She is staring at me in disbelief, and then determination.

“Tell them we’re sorry,” she whispers.

Tears are in her actual freaking eyes. She’s an old school nature gal, through and through.

“You want me to apologize of all of humankind’s sins?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says.

I shrug and type.

WE ARE SORRY.

There’s a long pause.

…sorry, for what?…

I turn to my mother. It’s a good question with a lot of answers.

“Hmm…how to summarize in a way they’ll understand,” she says.

She reaches down and pecks the keys with her fingertips.

“You never even learned to type?” I ask, rolling my eyes hard.

HUMAN PREDATION.

Another long pause. My mom’s breathing is shaky. I wonder what she’s expecting from these whales. A series of strange symbols pass by the screen. Finally, they resolve into the AI’s best guess of what’s happening.

<amusement>

…humans not important…

…many challenges…

…our history is told…

…memorized and told…

…spoken…

“Oh my god,” says my mother. “She’s talking about a spoken word history. The whales have been keeping a history. How long?”

HOW LONG?

…from cold to warm…a season of ages…depths…human hunters a hundred seasons ago…a tail flicker…

Mom is shivering. Holding her elbows. And she is grinning.

“All those years,” she says. “I’m sorry. For all the years.”

“They don’t really care,” I say.

“Not them. You, Marshall. I never saw you,” she says. “But after all this time. It was my son. My own son figured out what I never could. I’m talking to whales.”

Mom dances. A little jig. Breath pluming.

…why do you talk…

…where are you…

…ship is wrong…

“Can we get back to business, Naomi?” I ask.

“Right, right,” she says, leaning over the keyboard.

WE ARE DYING. NO AIR.

…need ascend…

TRAPPED INSIDE.

…ignore…

WARN OTHERS.

My chest is heaving. Mom seems to have gone silent. Her hand has gone limp in mine. On the monitor, I can hear hundreds of whales speaking. The translator can’t even begin to keep up. It’s like a family reunion out there.

It’s a soothing sound, as the world turns white around me.

To think of an ancient, unbroken matrilineal line of creatures, sharing knowledge and history and culture across thousands of years. And we humans—just a blip on their radar.

The water has risen to my knees and I didn’t notice. I try not to think about what’s going to happen. I take short breaths, squeezing my eyes closed. I know that I’ll panic in the end. I know that I’ll thrash. But until then, I’ll try to be brave.

“Mom,” I say, trying to keep my breathing steady. “Mama.”

I feel a strong grasp on my hand. I smell her familiar shampoo. And somehow, I am comforted.

My vision is swimming, but I manage to type a last message. Then things go gray.

SAVE OUR MATRIARCH.

The first burp takes me aback.

A smell like fish and vomit engulfs the room. A huge bubble comes strafing up out of the dark water, deflating itself on the surface. Divesting its air into our shrinking space. And another. Another.

A cauldron of bubbles, rising up.

…take our air…

…breathe…

…live, matriarch…

Below us, in the moon bay lights, I see gray, alien shapes moving back and forth. Whales. Many species. Each of them pauses below us, blows a gust of air from its blowhole and lets it filter upward.

My vision returns as air begins to fill the room again.

And an eye opens in the deep. A blue whale, just the head visible, lurking in the depths beyond the sideways moon pool. Watching us.

A monstrous bubble of whale breath bleeds up into the bay. I can feel my face again. The smell is wretched but I’m alive.

“We’re breathing whale breath,” I murmur.

“That’s what it smells like,” says Naomi.

In that moment, Mom and I share a look of disbelief. Then I feel a determination creeping in. We are both realizing there is too much to learn to give up now. Too much wonder in the world to leave it.

The R/V Aanaruaga is fully submerged. We are rapidly sinking toward the seabed. Luckily, our air is trapped with us. Trapped together in this moon pool laboratory, my mother and I have access to a communications console—and a hundred generations of cetacean knowledge.

“Dr. Wallace,” I ask, watching the whales gracefully pacing our descent on the other side of the moon pool. “Should we put our heads together? Find a way to survive this?”

My mother takes my hand. Her grip is strong.

“I think we should, Dr. Wallace,” she says. “I think we will.”

 

(Editors’ Note: Daniel H. Wilson interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2025 Daniel H. Wilson