message in a bottle - by rebecca

Summer, 2230

Dear Note-Finder,

If you have found this note, then I’ve contacted you from beyond the veil, and this ghost on paper is all that’s left of me. I was told that in the old days, the people believed that if you hung a bottle from a tree, you could catch a wayward spirit inside, then release it somewhere. I wrote this letter to tell you about my memories, so in a sense you’re releasing my spirit too. I don’t think there’s any of my kind left anymore, so I want someone to know about us. We were Midway scrappers - pearl divers, they called us, but we found much more than pearls in our time.

I suppose I’d better start from the beginning, and tell you all about my home. Midway Atoll was a beautiful place back then, all white and green and blue. Covered in trees, and full of albatross. Everywhere you looked you could see their white-feathered heads bobbing and picking at the Bermuda grass, and next to them, their fuzzy brown offspring, round as feathered melons. They’d come right up to us, and we loved them. You might think we hunted them for food, but to us they were as sacred as the trees themselves. They were noisy, but it never bothered us at all. Their songs were just part of the magic of our island home, as natural to us as the sound of the waves.

Three separate islands comprised the Atoll of Midway, before they were razed. We lived on the big one, Sand Island, and used the other ones for solar farming or what little crops we could grow. The great old buildings on Sand Island stood for hundreds of years before my people arrived, waiting through typhoons and the Rising Flood to eventually become our homes. I often wondered about the people who built them, so long ago, and about the Great World War that necessitated their construction. How these buildings made it as long as they did, we could never quite determine. We simply understood it as some of the island’s magic, some force that wanted to keep Her children safe.

The landmasses of Midway circled the lagoon: the other world, as blue as the warm cloudless sky at twilight, and just as deep. If Midway was a fine jade crown on the surface of the ocean, the lagoon was the gem set within it. Sheltered from the violent great Pacific, the lagoon was our nursery. Every Midway pearl diver learned their sacred craft in that lagoon, me included. Some of my earliest memories are of swimming deep, deep down into it, surrounded by all that blue, and that silence. Our other resident island brethren, the dolphins, lived there too. Like the dolphins, we humans all learned to hold our breath for a very long time, how to swim deep and note the water’s mounting pressure, then how to come up slowly to avoid getting sick. We learned to open our eyes to the salt water, ignore the sting, and find our bearings in the deep. Tradition dictated that we learned how to hunt for treasure the traditional way first - the pearl diving way - before we learned how to shoot a gun or pilot a boat. Our particular discipline of diving predated even the ancient 21st century structures where we lived.

At the bottom of the lagoon rested a metal statue of a woman, coated with barnacles and haloed by the rainbow of baby fish which darted all around her graceful form. She posed, serene, with one slender hand raised high and the other on her hip, her face raised to the sun, and her eyes pointed to the sky. At the bottom of the lagoon the sun’s rays rippled over her with the hypnotic, dancing square patterns of lapping ocean water, so that her face sometimes seemed to move. Later, after I learned a few things, I was able to recognize the sculpture’s art style: art deco. This would have made her around 300 years old, and therefore a likely remnant of Midway’s early period, the old time before the Rising Flood. But to us she was timeless, and her face was the face of the Goddess. Our bronze island Mother, protector of the sea, sky, and sand.

It may seem silly to worship a statue the way we did, but you must understand we at Midway lived a unique and sheltered childhood. There weren’t that many of us, maybe a thousand at most, and us kids were given to flights of fancy. Midway did have its strange magic, though. With what little we knew of the city dwellers and how miserable their lives seemed compared to ours - living in pods and eating powdered bugs while we spent each day outside, eating fresh seafood - we came to see ourselves as set apart, a bit special, perhaps. Almost none of us Midway residents, whether plant, animal or human, originated there. Our ancestors all washed up on Her shores one way or another. How lucky for us to receive such providence, to live in our Eden while the rest of the world seemed to sink in on itself. Maybe we were the Island’s chosen guardians of Her odd, motley little ark. After all, the Rising Flood and its typhoons took many other Pacific atolls, but never touched ours. The waters did rise, but they never covered more than Spit island - and then, only at high tide. Midway felt like a land outside of time, where the consequences of Man’s wreckage of Earth could never hurt us. It seemed only natural to thank and praise our tireless Mother at the bottom of Her lagoon.

Later I began to see the world for truth when I started pearl diving in earnest. The “pearl” name was a euphemism, of course - for the “pearls” we hunted were in fact bits of silicon, any we could find. Old cell phones, computer chips, circuits: all worth a fortune to the city-dwellers. So we hunted it. Anywhere humans went in our ocean eventually became paydirt for us, whether they lived or died - or how they died - was no concern. I’ve dived through shipwrecks, flooded city ruins, even crashed satellites and space stations, all for precious silicon. In this way, the terrible bounty of trash that littered our mother ocean became our sustenance.

And oh, it was vast. The first time I laid eyes on the great trash gyre, I felt … lost. Sick. It seemed endless, unnatural and disgusting with its lurid colors, bleached like bones from the salt and sun, some of it older than my great-grandparents. And it was crawling with humans, buying and selling their illicit trade on rusted ships moored like shopfronts in that cursed place. We scrappers sold our goods at the gyre marketplace, that illegal trading post of convenience on the crossroads of the ocean’s major currents. To me, it looked like a nightmarish mirror of my precious Midway, its very existence a blasphemy. The more I saw of our blasted planet on our diving journeys, the more I longed to go home to Eden, and stay there.

Such is not the way of the world though, especially not for hereditary divers like me. Tradition decreed that I dive for silicon, and so I did. It was a hard life. I became an itinerant traveler, dodging both our enemies and the cops at high speeds on the high seas, hunting in the dead of night with my crew and fending off rival scrappers with an assault rifle if they got too close or tried to rob us. It got bloody more times than I care to count, and I’ve got the scars to prove it. During this time, my life became nothing more than a series of dull sensations: the adrenaline rush of night raids, darkness, the smell of gasoline, salt water and smoke, the snap of AR fire, diving for my life with blood in my mouth, the coolness of a circuit board in my hand, the gyre market at night with its oil-slick bonfires, the unwelcome morning sun burning my hungover eyes, powdered bug paste, a hard bunk, and the ding of transferring blockchain funds. It seemed the price to keep Midway alive was to almost never see it again.

The longer I dove, the more I saw the world change. The battles for silicon became more and more brutal. After generations of divers picking and pulling, the underwater silicon supply dwindled. And eventually, so did the scrappers, and by our own hand, no less. The demand for black market silicon was so high by this time that almost none of us dove anymore. Instead, many scrappers started raiding ‘live’ craft - that is, working craft with people onboard - or even civilian seasteading settlements. Piracy, basically. It was a free-for-all, and no one was safe anymore. I am ashamed to admit I raided a civilian craft myself, but after the first one, I couldn’t do it again.

So, after that last scavenging tour of many months afield with little to show for it, I put my gun away for the last time. I left my crew, and decided to make my way back to Midway for good. I’d find some way to make myself useful, I figured. To live out my days back home was worth the shame of giving up diving early. It was high time I retired anyway, I thought, I was getting older and I had so many half - healed injuries I couldn’t swim anymore like I once could. I wanted to find a partner, have a family. See my siblings and my parents. I wanted to float in the lagoon.

But it was not to be. I never made it back. Why? Well - first I was arrested for piracy and illegal scrapping, tried, and then I went to international maritime prison for a while. Lots of us did, thanks to a joint international government crackdown on the great Pacific war for silicon. I saw quite a few familiar faces in that place, some I’d even shot at before. After that, I tried to get a job on the mainland to earn my passage home, but one thing led to another and I wound up in jail again, for thieving that time. After that, another stint for smuggling, and so on. You get the idea. I just had no idea how to hold a regular job. All the skills I spent my life perfecting were completely useless to me on the mainland. I realize now with much sadness that I’ve spent more time incarcerated on the mainland than I ever did on my lost Island home, and now it’s gone. The last I heard, they razed it and drove megapiers into the coral bed - my guess is it will be another massive seastead before long. And nowadays, the silicon scrapping is done by licensed government subcontractors.

I guess one upside is that, at least in prison, I learned how to read, which I greatly enjoyed and which let me write this card - by hand! - to you.

The only picture of Midway I have is this card, upon which I’ve written this letter. I don’t know when you may find this, but in my time, paper is rare. And I want you to see what my home looked like. From the time I started diving, I’ve carried this card with me as a good luck charm. It may not have kept me out of prison, but I think it did keep me alive long enough to write this, as I am very likely one of the last of my kind. Turn it over and give it a good hard look for me. Off to the right you can see the lagoon - do you think our Goddess statue is still there?

Thank you for taking the time to remember with me.

Yours from beyond,

[undecipherable, smeared ink]