Sea of Secrets Anthology

by J E Feldman

“Oh my God,” she breathed, staring into the creature’s unbelievably huge visage. “Her face….”

  “Everyone around here says she looks like Sailor Moon,” Simon noted. Pert, perfectly-formed lips inside the water suddenly let out a snarl, revealing rows of teeth, as sharp and horrendous as a humpback anglerfish. “With a few notable differences,” he admitted, shrugging.

  “Does she always look so...humanoid?”

  “Eerie, isn’t it?” he breathed in admiration. “Anime fans worldwide are going to have a field day when we publicize this. Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, we’ve found ourselves a real-life mermaid.”

  The creature tilted its head to the side and then, apparently giving its next move some thought, deliberately hawked a phlegm glob against the glass in Simon’s direction. The spittle, a dark blue sludge, retained its form for some time before finally dissipating near its creator’s face.

  “They have copper-based blood, don’t they? That’s why she spits blue?” Laura observed. “Just like an octopus.”

  “Copper-based, yes, but their blood is more like horseshoe crabs. As I said before, there was quite a fight when we initially had to subdue them on the deck, with blood shed on both sides. We analyzed theirs under a microscope and found it to have Limulus Amebocyte Lysate.”

  “LAL?”

  “Yes.”

  Laura scratched her head as she mulled this over. Stabbing another uncomfortable feeling into the pit of Laura’s stomach, the creature moved the pointed edge of one flap toward its own head, copying her motion. It was then that she saw it possessed not only four fingers, but a thumb, and in the center of its palm lay a large sucker. She shuddered to guess how strong it might be.

  “Horseshoe crab blood detects bacteria and endotoxin.”

  “Correct.”

  “And it sells to medical labs for $60,000 per gallon,” she stated nervously.

  “Yes, but horseshoe crabs are comparatively quite small. Our girls are, at their full length, nearly five feet long.” He gave a self-satisfied sigh. “All other factors aside, their blood alone make the ladies here worth several hundred thousand dollars a piece.”

  Laura blinked, looking away from the creature and over to him. “You’re hoping to harvest from their blood?”

  “Well...eventually, yes.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” she scoffed. “The only two of these animals ever found and you’re already planning on playing subaquatic Farmer John!”

  “If it’s possible, why not?”

  “Because,” she fumed, “it’s not possible. You have two animals—only two—and you already acknowledged they can’t survive for much longer. Farming would necessitate several hundred healthy adults. God only knows why they aren’t already dead, but they certainly can’t breed at this pressure level.”

  “Don’t underestimate them, Professor. They’ve got quite a few tricks up their sleeves.”

  “It’s a question of basic physics, Dr. Akimitsu—not ‘tricks.’”

  “Simon, please,” he interjected.

  “Fine,” she huffed. “Simon, you know as well as I do that obtaining a mass of animals from the Mariana Trench is not possible. It’s deeper than the height of Mt. Everest, for Pete’s sake. If these two hadn’t deliberately latched onto the submersible, you would never have found them at all. So there’s LAL in their blood. Hurray! But it’s not marketable and, frankly, I’m more than a little shocked to hear a man with your credentials talking of a find like this in terms of a business venture.”

  “I’m not interested in scientific and medical advancement, Laura—not money.”

  “Yeah,” Laura grunted, “well, if your idea could work, I’m sure Big Pharma would love to hear that.”

  “Pardon my language, Laura, but Big Pharma is LAL’s bitch. Without a steady supply of LAL, Big Pharma can’t release new medicines, medical equipment—Hell, even injectable water, without LAL testing, is worthless. But...what happens when horseshoe crabs are brought into a lab for bleeding?”

  “A lot of them die outright.”

  “Roughly 30% don’t survive of the approximately 400,000 that we annually harvest. Those that do make it, after we take 30% of their blood, are quickly returned to the ocean. A significant amount of the initial survivors have been weakened too severely to make it in the wild for more than two weeks or so. In short, this is a population of animals that we humans desperately need...and yet we’re killing them off.

  “We humans—and certainly Big greedy Pharma too—have to acknowledge a very unpleasant fact: if we don’t stop harvesting LAL in the manner we have been, both species could be in very big trouble. After all, when the horseshoe crab has been finally used up by us, what will we do?” Simon approached the glass, peering into the huge eyes before him. “What will we do?” he repeated, settling his hands on his hips and shaking his head.

  It was a grim concept. Laura shifted uncomfortably, staring again at the creature. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “But I do know we have a better chance of a Siberian unicorn charging at us than magical mermaid blood becoming a regularly-available natural resource.”

  Simon chuckled. “The Siberian unicorn is extinct, Laura. I’m just trying to ensure that the horseshoe crab doesn’t follow in its footprints.”

  “Well, be that as it may, you can’t breed two female specimens.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “We already have.”

  “What?”

  “Come,” he urged, motioning her with his hand as he began to move toward the lab door. “I’ll show you the nursery.”

  As Laura followed him, she turned back. Unmistakably the creature inside the aquarium was snarling….

  Exiting the lab, she pulled the night vision off, shook her head, and squeezed at the space between her eyes. “You’re cloning animals you know next to nothing about—animals whose genus you’re not even sure of yet! The sheer irresponsibility of it! I can’t believe—”

  “We didn’t have to clone them,” he shrugged.

  “So...one was...or is...pregnant?”

  He hesitated and then moved across the hallway. He opened the door to another black room. With a frustrated, anxious sigh, Laura trailed after him, reattaching her headgear. Once inside this second laboratory, she found Simon standing beside a portly, bearded fellow holding a clipboard.

  “Laura, this is Tom—or, as we tend to call him—our Nanny,” Simon put forward as the two of them shook hands. “He specializes in entomology and—”

  “Entomology? Then what is he doing here?”

  “Tom and I go way back. He was on board when the ladies first arrived. He’s been part of the team ever since. Now he watches over the babies.”

  “B-babies?” she stammered, feeling her knees buckle slightly.

  “Didn’t Simon tell you?” Tom inquired, placing a hand on her back and gently pushing her toward over a half dozen tanks, all much smaller than those occupied by their adult counterparts. Inside each, she saw more of those dimly-lit bioluminescent balls—eight in total. “Betty and Bea have several traits more typically seen by entomologists than marine biologists. That’s why Simon needs me to stay on board.”

  “Betty and Bea?”

  “You already met Betty,” Simon clarified. “Bea tends to be more solitary; doesn’t open her gliders up much to say hello.”

  “I don’t understand,” Laura fumed, starting to resent how they weren’t just giving her straight answers from the get-go. “How the Hell did you get these things to spawn?”

  “Very conveniently for us, they’re asexual,” Tom replied. “The ultimate aquatic amazons. No men required.”

  “Like cockroaches?”

  Tom put his hand over his chest. “Exactly! Ah, I see a woman after my own heart—one that knows her bugs.”

  Laura frowned at the three-inch long ‘children.’ “How old are they?”

  “Almost two weeks.”

  She grit her teeth, increasingly frustrated by the impossibility of
all this. “Logically, at this vulnerable stage, they should have even less of a shot at surviving on the surface than their mothers.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re quite frisky—playful even, I’d say,” Tom sighed. He tapped at the glass of one tank, prompting the youngster inside to swim up and attach on the other side. He tapped again and it swam in a circle, almost seeming to cartwheel.

  “But how do you know the specimen weren’t already pregnant when they were captured?” Laura persisted.

  “Because asexuality isn’t the only thing they share with the insect world. Truth be told, they’re a great deal like Glyptapanteles wasps,” Tom sighed.

  “What?”

  “They practice traumatic insemination,” Simon informed her, shifting uncomfortably at the particularly unpleasant thought. “That majestic coiffure coming out of their heads wasn’t hair, Laura. Those were stingers—thousands of them. Their stingers can stun, can catch prey, and, like the Glyptapanteles, can inject multiple young into the body of a host. This brood in front of you is Betty’s—genetically identical to her in every way, regardless of whose flesh it eventually came out of.”

  Clamping a hand over her mouth, Laura threw up in the back of her throat. She took a moment, swallowed down the awful acid taste, and then forced herself to regain her composure.

  “And what...or who...exactly did these creatures inseminate?”

  Simon swallowed, and then pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. “When the submersible tried to return to us, Yoshi went crazy. He ran up, right as the ladies disengaged from the machine.” His tone lowered as he handed her a small picture of a red Irish setter. “He grabbed hold of the back of Bea’s throat, shaking her back and forth. Betty crawled forward, wrapped her stingers around Yoshi and….” He was quiet for a few moments. “We didn’t even realize for the first few days what had really happened.”

  “Simon didn’t,” Tom interjected. “He didn’t want to.”

  “Yoshi kept whining so pitifully, but we couldn’t figure out the specific damage. There were lumps in his abdomen, but...I hoped they were only an allergic reaction to the stingers.”

  “And yet it was this: babies!” Tom announced gleefully. “Talk about hitting a jackpot!”

  “We did an ultrasound on Yoshi’s wound,” Simon muttered. “We saw the spawn inside.”

  “And growing bigger by munching away on Yoshi’s insides,” Tom finished for him. “It was a nasty way to go, let me tell you.”

  “I had that dog for twelve years,” Simon murmured. “I am hoping that something good can come out of him dying that terrible way.”

  “Given the rate at which these things grow, pal, that’s a guarantee. Give it a month or two and I bet you anything that these little buggers in there will be aching to inseminate whatever poor bastard crosses their path too.”

  Laura staggered back a few steps, sinking into a chair.

  It was possible, she acknowledged suddenly. Saving the endangered horseshoe crabs by farming these creatures instead… Yes, it just might work. Given that from embryo to juvenile, they seemed to grow at a comparable rate to horseflies, Hell, it might not even be that hard to have a sizeable population ready for bleeding before the biomedical facilities begging for LAL could blink. But the risks involved… Good Lord, the risks…

  Slowly, Simon sat on the edge of the desk beside her. “If we do this right, bacterial testing will become more affordable. Consequently, the price of medicine and vaccines will decrease—perhaps dramatically.”

  “That’s a little optimistic, don’t you think?”

  “This work might save thousands of lives, Laura.”

  She bit her lip. She wanted to argue, but he wasn’t wrong.

  “We need level-headed, committed people on board for this. It’ll be high-stress work with long hours, but...I wasn’t kidding when I said this could win a Nobel. How many chances do you think you’ll have in this life to secure your name in history?”

  “Oh, give me a break!” she snapped. “You’re going to have to do a lot better than appealing to my intellectual vanity in order to get me to work with these damn things.”

  Simon let out a long breath, giving her a few moments to think things through.

  Pressing her palms into her knees, Laura leaned forward, awash with moral discomfort. Studying animals was an experience as capable of creating shame as satisfaction.

  “I once worked in this lab with several octopuses. One of them was named Hector,” Laura murmured. “Everybody working there thought his cage was secured, but...but somehow Hector managed to get out. When you work with cephalopods, you know there’s always that risk. They’re so clever; masters of escape...

  “Anyway, when we realized he was missing, we searched and searched. A half an hour went by and all the people working there knew that, any minute, Hector was going to die because there’s only so long he could be outside of water… And then, lo and behold, there his miserable corpse was—looking so limp and dry. Just one glance at him and we all knew he was gone.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, a few glances later and we realized that Hector just had a dark sense of humor. He latched his suckers onto one of my colleagues’ ankles, yanked him off his feet, and bit two of his fingers off before the poor bastard even knew what hit him.” Laura took a deep breath. “You know, I truly do love cephalopods, but I never, even for an instant, forget how dangerous they are.”

  She rose to her feet, removing her headgear and setting it on a desk before leaving the room. How she longed for some fresh air! As she made her way back onto the ship’s deck, she heard Simon’s footsteps rapidly approaching behind her.

  “Hey!” he called. “I know the ladies are dangerous! They killed my dog, remember?”

  She moved quickly up against the railing, leaning on it and staring down at the ocean. “Yoshi died from being stabbed with an ovipositor. An ovipositor, for God’s sake! That’s like being bayoneted to death by a damn turkey baster. How do you know the same thing might not happen to any one of the scientists you’ve got to work on this project? I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly fancy the concept of a batch of aquatic parasites being implanted in my soft tissue.”

  “Look, we take every precaution—”

  “Oh, yeah? Then who or what is going to be the host to the next generation? Another dog?”

  He leaned against the rail beside her, folding his hands together. “The Glyptapanteles wasp doesn’t go around, tossing its fluids into any old critter. No, they have a particular host, a caterpillar, which they seek out. No doubt, down there,” he pointed toward the Trench. “Betty and Bea have some animal, likely a large one, which...accommodates their needs. My hope was you might be able to figure out what it is.”

  “Crazy as all this is so far, it might as well be a dunkleosteus.”

  “Hey,” he laughed uneasily. “Who knows? Maybe these are how megaladon really disappeared.”

  “I can’t make educated guesses about their typical host without knowing the depth they were found at, Simon. You know that.”

  “Just do your best, Laura. That’s all I’m asking for.”

  “I suppose I’ll just toss them in with a baby whale or a shark and see what happens,” she snorted.

  “Well, that brings up another point. It would be good for us to know who their natural predators are.”

  “Isn’t that obvious?” Laura scoffed. “They were just fine until we came along, weren’t they? And now, they’re being readied for mass production and then a lengthy mass slaughter. In five years, if you have your way, we’ll be seeing mermaid products for sale in Wal-Mart. The kiddos will have stuffed toys that look like them, all sparkly and cute, while the adults will be ripping their veins open like a gang of Bela freaking Lugosis.”

  “From your publications,” he replied after a quiet pause, “I imagined you might have some ethical misgivings. That’s okay. I don’t want anyone on my team who doesn’t.

  �
��It’s a bad situation, Laura. You know how many kids out there in third world countries die because their parents can’t afford medicine? How many of them are destroyed because the one vaccine which could’ve saved their life...just wasn’t available? Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to be responsible for any cruelty to animals, but this is a war for life and I’ve chosen which side I’m on: the human side; those kids’ sides. You’ll have to make a choice too, Laura. Whoever you decide to fight for, I won’t hold it against you. I just hope, if it’s not us, that you’ll give it a few days before you make your mind up.”

  She stared down into the waves lapping against the ship’s grey metal siding. “You were on board when they first appeared….”

  “Yes.”

  “What was the submersible doing in the Mariana Trench anyway?”

  He visibly swallowed. “That’s classified.”

  “Classified?” She spat, a mental note springing to the back of her mind that she hadn’t heard of any dives into the Trench being recently performed by the Sylvia Earle at all. “Who the Hell was funding the expedition? And, if I take this job, who is my employer going to be? Is the name on my checks going to be classified too?”

  “Payment is processed through me.”

  “But you aren’t the real boss.”

  “No,” Simon admitted.

  “No way I’m agreeing to those terms,” she fumed. “No sane person would!”

  Simon’s dark eyes steeled. Throwing down the gauntlet, he responded sharply, “If you walk away from this, you will regret it for the rest of your life, Laura—not because of the Nobel; not even because of the medical advancements that will be made. You’ll regret it because you’re in love with the ocean’s evolution. Anyone that has read your work or has seen you lecture knows that, more than most, sea life feeds your soul in a way that nothing else ever will. If you abandon these creatures, leave them at the mercy of another, perhaps less qualified researchers, you’re going to be the scientific equivalent of the old drunk at the bar, moaning to everyone who passes by about the girl who got away.”

  Elbows perched on the railing, Laura interlocked her fingers in front of her face. “The research done on Hector...I wasn’t in charge of it. The ones who were weren’t of the opinion that octopuses are capable of feeling pain. They were doing...things...to the animals. In retrospect, I can’t believe I was ever involved in something so vile. I was actually trying to argue for an anesthesiologist to be brought in on the experiment when Hector escaped. The guy whose fingers were bitten off wasn’t a bad person, but I can’t say that I blamed Hector even remotely for doing that to him. And, if he’d bitten my fingers off too, I wouldn’t blame him for that either…