From the Deep

Scientific Study

Dr Ian Woon was a marine biologist. He lived in a windy, freezing city along the Pacific coast, and his work was split between windy, freezing days down by the water looking at stuff or back at the lab a few blocks away looking at it even harder. He enjoyed his job. And so it wasn't a terrible burden to be called back now, in the middle of his month off, to look at the strange new organism that Nigel had refused to describe as anything but a "mermaid."

"You just have to see it," he kept insisting. 

Ian pulled into the parking lot. He parked his car nice and neat in between the lines, despite his hurry, because that was the kind of person he was. Once he got out and locked the doors, though, he ran. 

Nigel and the others had brought the carcass into the room they used for the most delicate of studies. The body was lying on a dissecting table when Ian came in. He stepped closer to look at it, and sucked in a breath. 

It wasn't a pleasant sight. The team had cleared away most of the sand that had covered the body, but it was still filthy. About half of the skin had rotted away, as well as a good portion of the internal organs that had been revealed. There was just barely enough left to understand anything about the structure of the body. It was vaguely dolphin-shaped, but longer and skinnier, and instead of flippers there was a structure that looked very much like a shoulder. The rest of the front limbs had fallen off. There were no back limbs; the body stretched out into a tail. The whole thing was multicolored with spreading patches of rot. 

"What have you been able to find out about it so far?" Ian breathed as he pulled on latex gloves and prepared to join the team of workers. 

Nigel had been taking photographs of the creature from every angle and jotting down measurements. He looked up at Ian and shook his head. "It's been dead for a really, really long time," he said. "That's about it. When the kid found it, it was half-buried in the sand. He thought it was a dead human at first."

There was something human-like about the shape of the front half of the body, but the creature certainly didn't look human. Gingerly, Ian touched the spot where the jawbone connected to the skull and noticed its unusual shape; he tried to tell if it was naturally like that, or because of the process of decaying.

"By the time we dug it out of the sand, there was already a reporter on the spot and a huge crowd of people trying to see," Nigel continued. "They were already calling it a mermaid. But of course, we didn't let them see anything very well."

Of course not, thought Ian. People got so excited over anything they wanted to get excited about. And while this bizarre new find certainly was something to get excited about, it certainly was not a mermaid that was causing all the excitement. 

"Let's figure out what it is, then," he said happily to the roomfull of biologists, and began to work.

Later that week, Ian sat down in the lab's computer room and prepared to write a report about what they had discovered thus far. Which wasn't a lot. And wasn't very illuminating either. 

He tapped an empty pen against his chin for a few moments before beginning. 

The paper was long, full of details and photos and careful careful choices of words. This was not a thing he was used to describing. This was entirely new. 

... A large organism was discovered on September 3rd washed up on a public beach ... The body showed signs of being dead for a long time ... not much of it was left ... Further inspection revealed the organism to not be of any known species ... 

... body is too far gone to provide any certain understanding of its classification ... definitely mammalian and female ... 

... The public has already begun to refer to the discovery as a "mermaid."

The report was published. Nobody cared much. Soon the media attention died down, and that was that.