by Gregory Mone
“So, to all of you out there who never believed, all of you doubters and skeptics and closed-minded cranks who thought it was impossible, absurd, ridiculous . . . to all of you, I have one thing to say. Something I can now say with absolute and complete certainty and real, verifiable proof.
“Atlantis is real!”
22
The Long Dream
The ship burst up out of the water like a great fish.
Kaya’s friends cheered as they soared into the sky.
The gravity drive turned on automatically, and they coasted above a glassy sea.
The surface—Kaya had sped straight through the roof of her ocean world and made it to the surface. The sky was endless. Infinite. Her whole life, she’d lived in a world with walls. But this place went on forever, and the light and colors were like nothing she could have ever imagined. She was too stunned to speak. The horizon began to glow orange and red. Then a kind of fire appeared over the water, far in the distance. The fire grew into a burning ball of flame that rose higher and higher in the sky, and soon everything all around them was blue. The sky was a bright, painful blue, the ocean below a deep, dark blue. And the fireball cast its powerful light over everything.
Her eyes ached. She had to squint. “What is that?” she asked, pointing into the distance.
“The sun,” Hanna replied.
Of course! The sun. She’d made it to the surface, into the light of the sun, and it was all so much stranger than she could have imagined.
“Don’t look straight at it,” Lewis warned. “It’s bad for your eyes.”
“We might need to get you some sunglasses,” Hanna said.
“Cool ones,” Lewis added.
“Right,” Hanna replied. “I’ll pick them.”
Kaya placed her hands on the pads and steered the ship higher so she could see more of the water. The color of the sea changed to an even darker blue in the distance. But the sky—the sky was this bright, radiant blue in all directions, as far as she could see. And there was just so much space! The aquafarms and cities were the largest open areas in Atlantis, and you could still stand at one end and see the far side if the light was bright enough. But the sunstruck surface of the planet and the great dome of the sky all around her stretched on and on and on—forever.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Lewis asked.
Kaya certainly did not.
“West,” Hanna answered. “Keep the sun behind us, and we should reach the coast before long.”
Lewis rubbed his wrist where the watch had been. “My compass would be helpful right about now.”
“Hey,” Hanna reminded him, “it was worth the trade. We’re here, aren’t we?”
He nodded, then turned quiet. Thinking of his father, Kaya guessed.
After playing the clip of the professor’s journal several times, they’d switched back to Hanna’s music, and Kaya listened, almost liking some of it, as they soared over the water, cruising west. Sea creatures appeared and swam below them, as if they were being welcomed—or welcomed back—to this upper world. A pod of hundreds of dolphins churned through the water ahead. She’d heard of these beautiful swimmers but had never seen one herself.
Kaya panicked when Hanna pointed to something flying high above them. They laughed, wondering why she was frightened, and explained that this thing was called a bird. What had they expected? There were no birds in Atlantis—no flying creatures at all, except for Atlanteans in cruisers and gravity suits. Kaya wondered, as she watched the bird, what else she was going to see and learn. What other strange mysteries lay ahead?
The ship flew over huge islands of garbage and plastic that stretched for miles. This was the pollution that had inspired the Erasers to attempt that fateful meeting with the surface, and later plan their attacks. Her friends looked ashamed as they coasted over this refuse, this clear sign that the People of the Sun really were poisoning the seas.
After they’d been cruising for several hours through the clear air, a metal bird appeared high above them. “What’s that?” Kaya asked. This time she tried to seem casual, not quite so surprised.
“A jet,” Lewis said. He turned to Hanna. “They’re tracking us.”
“Escorting us home, I hope,” Hanna replied.
So the Sun People had airborne machines, too. Not quite as elegant as the ones in Atlantis, Kaya decided, and shockingly loud. But the thing was certainly fearsome and fast. Soon it was joined by another flying craft, one with some kind of spinning blade that held it aloft. This vehicle—Hanna explained that it was called a helicopter—flew closer to them. There were several people inside, and a man studied them through one of the windows. Lewis held up his hand, waving, and then raised his right thumb. The man smiled back, returned the thumb signal, and then patted the pilot on the shoulder. Kaya would have to remember the thumbs-up signal. Maybe this was the way Sun People said hello.
“How long have we even been gone?” Lewis asked.
Hanna laughed. “I don’t know, but it feels like a year.”
The machines were leading them now. Before long, more jets were flying above them, and more helicopters surrounded them, too. Kaya was thrilled. When a wide, blurry form appeared on the distant horizon, however, she was stunned speechless. For a while, she simply stared at the growing mass above the water. She almost didn’t want to ask. Finally she summoned the courage. “Is that land?”
“That’s home,” Lewis answered.
Kaya laughed to herself. She was within sight of a world she’d only dreamed about. A world most of her people insisted didn’t exist. And she would tour the surface, their towns and cities and mountains. She’d play their games—this soccer thing Lewis had started talking about. Chocolate sounded interesting, too. And she’d definitely have to see the animals. Well, except for the goats. She didn’t want to see the goats. But then what? She couldn’t stay here. Her dad was in trouble. He needed her, and she needed to understand why he had done what he had done. She needed to understand why he was an Eraser. She had to learn more about what had happened to her mother, too, and she hoped he would finally tell her everything. No matter who he worked for or what secrets he’d kept from Kaya, he was her father. She loved him. And he was going to need her help.
Yes, she’d see the Sun People’s world, the marvelously dry and sunburnt surface, but she wouldn’t stay long.
She had to return to Atlantis.
Epilogue
Michael yawned and staggered down the hall. He’d been wearing his brother’s T-shirt to bed at night; it reached his knees. He pulled the collar up over his nose and mouth. Even all these days later, all the nights sleeping in the shirt, it still smelled like Lewis.
When was his brother going to come home?
His dad changed the subject whenever Michael asked. And his mother? She always hurried out of the room without even saying a word. He dug some crust out of the corners of his eyes and wiped it on the wall. “Mom?” he called out.
The kitchen was empty.
The living room, too.
He glanced outside. Clear skies.
“Mom?” he called out again, louder. “Dad?”
He rubbed his eyes. He’d had a terrible sleep. Nightmares, maybe. With pumpkins. Or maybe animals? He couldn’t remember and didn’t really want to. Some kind of alarm had gone off in the middle of the night, too. But not his dad’s alarm. This one was loud enough to shake the house. It had been dark at the time, though, so he’d fallen back asleep and dreamed of lions. Yes, that was it! He had dreamed that endless grasslands stretched out in front of their house instead of trees and that lions were stalking him.
He slipped on one shoe, just like his brother. Several of his friends were doing it now, too. Lewis was right; the trend was definitely catching on.
When Michael pushed open the front door and stepped onto the porch, the old familiar yard was there. No savannah. No lions.
But no parents, either.
He called out again. “Mom?”
He walked to the end of the porch and saw her standing in the yard. A small crowd was gathered around their property. Their neighbors and a few other parents and kids. Some of Lewis’s friends were there—Jet was wearing only one sneaker. And Michael’s mom was staring over the treetops at the clear sky, holding her ear, listening to someone on the phone. Then she dropped her hand.
He called her name again, but she didn’t hear him.
Michael could barely hear himself.
Dozens of hovercars and a few helicopters were flying low over the trees, heading in their direction. The flock surrounded a weird glass vehicle with a metal bottom. It was shaped almost like a teardrop or some kind of whale, and it had no wings. No fans that he could see, either. He wasn’t sure whether to run back to the house and roll under his bed or race to his mother’s side. She turned and saw him; Michael hurried to her. She knelt next to him and held him tight. “It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t worry. It’s okay.”
Only then did he notice that she was smiling.
For the first time in a week, his mother was smiling.
The glass ship turned sideways and drifted silently down to the grass. No wings. No fans. No noise. Was it magic? Michael kept glancing at his mother. She was biting her lip. A door in the side of the ship opened, and his older brother stepped out into their yard. He paused for a second, as if he were breathing the air for the very first time. Then Lewis ran toward them barefoot across the wide grass lawn.
Members of the Board,
Recent developments indicate that Gates has discovered the location of Atlantis. Our estimates were off, and their technology is even more advanced than we anticipated.
Needless to say, this changes our plans. I suggest convening an emergency meeting to discuss next steps. We must act now or risk losing everything.
Sincerely,
R.B.
The Science of the Accidental Invasion
The earliest mention of Atlantis dates back to an old Greek thinker named Plato. Smart dude, great robe, weird dating habits. Anyway, Plato told a story about a highly advanced, ancient civilization, an island nation that later sank into the sea. For one reason or another, people never really gave up on the idea. Some explorers are still on the hunt for evidence of this vanished world.
The way I see it, if Atlantis did exist, and its people found a way to survive under the sea, it wouldn’t involve living as fish folk. I’ve been trying to be a fish since I was eight years old. It’s really hard. So I imagined a different kind of Atlantis, one in which the people sealed themselves off from the sky as their land sank, and gradually built up a world below the seafloor. That led to a few questions.
How Would They See?
That big orange-yellow thing up in the sky is pretty important. Sure, we have electric lights inside and outside our homes and buildings, but without the sun, our world would be a pretty dark place. So how would the Atlanteans make their way around? I thought about having them use echolocation, kind of like bats, but then Lewis and Hanna would’ve been bumping their way through their story. Instead, the Atlanteans develop technology based on bioluminescence, in which life-forms generate their own light. One source of inspiration was these weird little glowworms that hang out in caves in New Zealand, casting an eerie blue light. Look them up. The photos are wild.
What Would They Breathe?
Up here on the surface, we get to breathe this stuff called oxygen. The Atlantis in this story is filled with aquafarms and greenery because the people down there would need a source of oxygen, too. Granted, algae and other sea plants need sunlight to crank out oxygen, and that wouldn’t work in Atlantis. So, instead of sunlight, the artificial and bioluminescent lights in the caves provide the necessary energy to make enough breathable air. Think of them like the grow lamps people use in indoor farms or even on the space station . . . only Atlantean. Plants prefer blue light anyway.
What Would They Eat?
There would be no hamburgers in Atlantis. I’m sorry. It just wouldn’t work. First you’d have to get all the cows in SCUBA gear . . . no, it just isn’t reasonable. The Atlanteans would survive on a diet of sea vegetables and fish of various kinds.
How Would Their Technology Be Different?
Humans are a pretty smart bunch. All of us; not just the famous or powerful folk. Now imagine you trap a whole bunch of us down in an enclosed world like Atlantis, and give us a few thousand years to think and invent and tinker, without connecting or sharing our ideas with anyone up here on the surface. Don’t you think these people would come up with some neat inventions? I do. And since they wouldn’t have sunlight to study, or stars to gaze at, they’d probably focus their efforts in other areas. Sound, for example. Or even gravity! Our scientists up here on the surface don’t really, truly understand gravity, or how it works. But maybe if we’d spent the last few hundred years focused on that, instead of working on fine-tuning lasers and splitting atoms, we might all be drifting around like Kaya.
Would They Be Mermaids?
Now, I love mermaids. Totally. Always wanted to meet one. But it just wouldn’t make sense for Atlanteans to be swimming around in the open ocean. The pressure that deep is crushing. The water is frigid. And you’d need gills! Evolution has done some amazing stuff on this planet. But as the professor notes in the story, a few thousand years wouldn’t be enough time for evolution to give Atlanteans the ability to breathe underwater.
Would They Be Angry?
Yes, yes, and yes. Given what we’re doing to the seas and the skies, Atlantis would be livid. That’s our next topic.
Why Atlantis Would Be Furious
If a highly advanced civilization really lived down on the ocean floor, they really would not like us very much. Sun People like you and me are filling the ocean with plastic. The greenhouse gases our cars and factories are pumping into the air are also sinking into the ocean, harming all types of sea creatures. Warming temperatures and melting ice could even change the way currents move around the world. I asked the marine scientist Chris Reddy if he thought any of these changes would impact Atlantis. He said that scientists who study the oceans compare the movement of water to a giant conveyor belt. If our glaciers keep melting, and more freshwater flows into the ocean, then that conveyor belt will stop moving. “If the conveyor belt were to stop, Atlantis would be in trouble,” Reddy told me.
But I have to think the Atlanteans would be really angry about all that plastic. The researcher Jenna Jambeck and her colleagues found that roughly eight million metric tons of plastic entered the world’s oceans from 192 different countries in the year 2010 alone. That’s the weight of about four million SUVs!
So where does it go? One group of researchers estimated that more than five trillion pieces of plastic are floating on the sea surface. Some of it drifts below the surface or washes up on shore. And some sinks all the way down to the bottom. Scientists have even found plastic in the Mariana Trench, miles below the surface.
This isn’t just about the bottles and caps and straws you’ll find during the average beach cleanup, either. Scientists are also focusing on microplastics—tiny threads or fragments that wash right off our clothing. Say you live in the Midwest somewhere, and you wash your favorite fleece jacket. The water that rinses it clean also pulls off tiny bits of plastic in the fibers. Next the water probably flows to a treatment plant, where it’s cleaned up a little, then pumped into a river system. Treatment plants don’t filter out the microfibers, though, so the plastic bits rush out right with the treated water, into larger rivers and, eventually, the sea.
When scientist Ian Kane and his colleagues removed a sample of stuff from the seafloor off the coast of Italy, they discovered 1.9 million little pieces of plastic in a tiny area just one meter—or about three feet—on a side. “Microfibers are the dominant plastic on the seafloor,” Kane told me.
So what’s the big deal? The marine scientist Chris Reddy said it is helpful to think of the ocean like a factory. Normally, in
a factory, you add stuff in, like cotton fibers, and then you get stuff out, like nice new T-shirts that don’t smell like armpits. (Reddy didn’t talk about armpits; that’s me.) Well, now we’re putting the wrong stuff in the oceans, so we should expect to get the wrong stuff out. Toxins and chemicals can latch on to these tiny plastics. Little creatures gobble them up. Then bigger creatures munch on them, and the little bits of plastic and chemicals move from one life-form to the next . . . all the way, in some cases, to the fish on our plate. Scientists don’t really know what they do, or how much harm they inflict. But it’s not likely that all this plastic is healthy, either for us or the ocean’s many creatures and critters.
So what can we do? What can you do? Well, first of all, don’t leave it to the adults. I asked a few scientists and ocean activists what they thought, and the filmmaker and photographer Shawn Heinrichs, one of the leaders of the ocean conservation group SeaLegacy, started off with one very clear point. “Don’t wait for your parents to make a difference,” he suggested. “If you wait for someone else to fix it, then it’s not going to happen. You have the power to communicate, and people are starting to listen to your voice. There’s nothing stopping you from putting down TikTok or Instagram, becoming informed, and turning yourself into an ocean ambassador.”