But my mother had a good reason to be concerned with my missions—her uncle had died when his fishing boat had gotten caught in a storm far out to sea. Only a few years later, my father died when equipment on the oil rig on which he was conducting marine research failed. That I had so single-mindedly gone after being a marine biologist had always bothered my mother. And I hadn’t chosen a safe job like the aquarium or something close to home, either.
Despite her fears, I’d never had something like this happen before on a research trip, nor had such an unsettled feeling. I’d done research in the middle of nowhere, with little connection to the outside world. I’d spent long months in places most people would never see, much less seek out, in barren, rocky, freezing places, in jungles, on sun-bleached beaches. Some were paradise, others less than ideal, full of muck, mud, and mosquitos. But I’d never run—I’d stuck to my job, goal, and mission as a marine biologist bent on saving the world’s oceans and the creatures that resided there.
This was the first time I’d felt anxious like this. Edgy enough to consider that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be here.
But two days was too early to start to worry like this. I had to buck up and do my job.
I finished my meal, then took what shower I could in the small shower room with almost no water pressure attached poorly to the side of the cabin. Light and sea air flowed through the cracks, and I wondered how anyone showered during the winter when it would be frigid.
It was probably impossible.
Having eaten and bathed, I returned to my computer to analyze the data I’d collected so far.
The sense of unease returned full force as I searched through the numbers and trends. I shut my laptop with too much force, pushing away from the table with a sudden surge of anxious energy. Bursting out into the daylight, I took gulps of fresh air, watching a sea bird winging across the shore until it caught an updraft, wheeling higher and higher until it was a speck against the sky.
I made my way down to the beach, picking my way across the rocky shore to the instruments I’d laid in the water, trying to think.
In all my years, I’d never seen anything like this.
As the preliminary information had suggested, the marine life was acting far from normal. This was why I’d been sent here, the entire reason I was alone in a cabin on a remote, disputed island.
The question was, why? And how?
I took my samples and headed back to the cabin, anxiety sinking away as my mind churned with ideas, the scientist replacing the anxious person. The information contained in the facts and figures confirmed the readings from the samples—someone had been tampering with the island and the waters around it.
When I stepped outside again, I could see the issue—someone had been laying something off the coast. Possibly power lines, although it was impossible to tell at this distance. But they weren’t quite powerlines, or at least none that I had seen. And they radiated far more sound and signal than the lines I’d had to deal with in my research, which was spooking the wildlife. You could almost see in the tagged animals' data how they went out of their way to avoid the powerlines. And those who got too close seemed to lose their way entirely, straying far off their standard patterns, swimming in circles, or swimming erratically.
But there was something else, too.
The instruments had been picking up another signal, one I’d been tracking. At first, I’d dismissed it as a mistake or an aberration, the result of an uncalibrated machine or signal interference. I’d recalibrated the instruments twice, just to be safe.
But two days in, the signal was too persistent to be an aberration, and the reason was becoming abundantly clear; the signal was a radioactive one. One way off the charts and too high to be accurate, at least not at a safe level. Except, there was no way I could explain it away anymore, no way I could foist it off onto bad machinery or a mistake. No way I could dismiss it as anything other than what the data told me it was.
“What exactly is going on here?”
As my words hit the air, I felt the anxiety as cold prickled under my skin, a tightening, shivering of my muscles as they contracted, readying me for flight.
Except I had nowhere to go.
My mind went back to the difficulty I’d had finding a boat to bring me to this remote part of the island. The difficulty I’d had, the way I’d had to cajole and beg, the extra money I’d had to spend just to get here. I remembered the anxious gazes of the fishermen. And I remembered the way I had passed it off as the usual reticence of the local people, their distrust of a foreign stranger who had come from the direction of Japan.
But maybe it hadn’t been normal at all. Perhaps they had been anxious, scared of something. Did the residents know what was going on?
I was on a remote part of the island, but I imagined I would still see some fishing vessels—the standard fish migration patterns through this area almost guaranteed it. But I’d seen nothing. At all.
Even the wildlife I thought I would see seemed sparse.
What was going on here? Did the residents know something I didn’t? Had they seen something strange going on? They had to have at least noticed the marine life’s peculiar behavior. Did they know but hadn’t wanted to tell a stranger? Or were they just as in the dark as I was and scared?
Maybe it was time I made my way back to the other side of the island. It would be a long hike, but I had enough gear to get me through. I would leave a sign for the others, something to tell them what was going on and to keep away, or maybe I would run into them before they arrived. Perhaps they hadn’t been able to find someone to take them, and they were still waiting in the small village or hiking their way here over several days.
Whatever it was, something told me I had to get away from here. I had as much information as I needed, and anyway, I was a marine biologist, not a soldier. Whatever was going on was far outside of my job description.
I planned my evacuation in my head. I would only take what I could carry, including my computer with all the data and the food I didn’t need to heat up. I would hike to the other side of the island, a move that would probably mean camping out in the open for a night or two. Then I would find a ride back to Japan.
Opening my laptop again, I collated all the data I’d collected into a compressed file and opened my web browser.
Only to find that it wouldn’t load.