By Sophia Li

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Two friends venture through a flooded Earth, searching for signs of life.

Jupiter stumbled on the rocky shore, one hand splayed out in front of her to keep from falling on her face. The sky was a deceiving shade of light blue, half covered in wispy gray clouds. To her left were countless trees of green and brown, rippling in the wind. To her right was the shore. 

Jupiter kept walking. Earth’s gravity was still something she was getting used to. A few weeks ago, her first step on this planet had been unnerving. Now, though, along with the grass and the trees and the cerulean sky, it was refreshing. Grounding her to her human roots.

Cosmo came up behind her. “We haven’t found anyone else.” 

“It hasn’t even been a month yet. And we haven’t explored much.”

“Jupiter,” Cosmo said mildly, “just because there’s… creatures and plants … doesn’t mean there’s other people here.”

“We have a better chance of finding people here than we do on any other planet in our solar system.”

Silence, except for the crashing of waves on the shore.

They’d been surrounded by water ever since landing here – Earth had been flooded, after all – but the ocean, the one thing she knew humankind had never fully explored, so vast and endless and blue, was kind of unnerving. There was no shelter of the canopy in the humid woods, or the undergrowth in the swamp territory. It was just water and sky, the horizon stretching as far as the eye could see.

She headed for the sea, her boots sinking into the sand. Her shadow fell over the shore, bobbing as she walked. Cosmo’s shadow was close behind.

Carefully she waded into the ocean, insulated by her suit, until she was knee-deep. She focused on what was in front of her. If she looked too far, she’d feel like the water was somehow swallowing her.

There was a wire mesh underneath the water. Not much had been caught, just seaweed and debris. Jupiter lifted up a portion of the mesh. Something glittered. She took it off the wire and lifted it up. A thin silver chain with a pendant dangling at the end – a necklace. Excitement zipped through her veins. “Check this out.”

Cosmo came up behind her, but he refused to enter the water. The pendant wasn’t corroded. It was a soft amber color, and it seemed to glow against the pulsing tide. Jupiter inspected the chain. Same thing. This necklace wasn’t from the old world.

What the pendant was made of? A special pearl, maybe? Something resistant to the elements? She put it in the pocket of her suit.

“You done?” Cosmo asked. He was looking up and down the shoreline, as if something could attack them at any moment. Jupiter didn’t get it. There were no trees to hide behind. He could spot danger from a mile away.

“Just about.” Jupiter zipped up her pocket, then skimmed the shallow water one more time. A blurry movement further inside the ocean caught her eye.

Something alive, swimming against the tide. A dark shape. Maybe it was a mutant fish, a really big one – in that case they better get out of there. But when the creature turned, she saw that it had four limbs, splayed out easily in a swimming motion.

“Hey.” Jupiter took out the necklace. “Did you leave this?”

The creature actually turned around. Jupiter saw a head, two arms, a pair of feet that looked unnaturally long – stretched in the watery lens of the sea. Nothing like anything she’d read about in her classes. Distinctly humanlike.

She blinked. The water-human pumped its legs, and then it was gone.

Jupiter spun around to face Cosmo. “Did you see that?”

“I saw you talking to yourself.”

“Cosmo, I saw a person.”

He nodded slowly. “When did you last eat?”

Jupiter swung the necklace in front of his face. “This was made recently. There’s no corrosion –” Cosmo squinted, his eyes following the swinging pendant. “ – and the thing in the water wasn’t a fish. It had four legs.”

“Maybe it was a cephalapod,” he said uneasily. “They have a lot of limbs.”

“It wasn’t an octopus.” Another thought sparked in her mind. “And didn’t Nova say not everyone made it to space before the Flood? People could’ve learned to live in the sea.” Somehow. Jupiter ignored the skeptical look on Cosmo’s face. Her heart pounded with excitement. “And they probably do live in water, at least… this is huge.” She thought of a submarine society, deep in the Mariana Trenches, people with technology and resources that could help the Star Falcon. She thought of a properly explored ocean, her mind even wandering far enough to provide a surreal image of humans with gills. She dug around in her backpack for her map, to mark the cave with a red asterisk. 

In her enthusiasm she did not notice the subtle widening of Cosmo’s eyes that spoke more to fear than to elation, nor the way his hand twitched toward the necklace, as if he was trying to get rid of it. 

Process

I usually like to write realistic fiction, so this story was a nice way for me to explore more fantastical elements in my writing. This piece is inspired by a very old idea I had a few years ago (at the time I wanted to write a sci-fi novel). Now that I’ve grown as a writer I’m proud that I’ve been able to convey the ideas I want to in this piece. Outer space and the ocean have always been fascinating to me, as well as the different opinions people can have about the unknown.