From the Deep

The Song of Souls

The problem, now that they had found a possibly viable way to not only communicate with the mermaid, but converse, was this: Should they?

Ian was hesitant even to ask his team what the should use their newfound abilities for. Should they try to understand what Andersen saw as "hungry" music or "tired" music and play that before lunch time or night time? Should they find a "questioning" song and figure out a way to question Andersen about her life before being captured at the surface?

Ian was afraid to ask, because he was afraid that he wouldn't like the answers he got in return. Exactly what answers he was afraid of getting, he couldn't say. 

There was no real reason to be afraid of conversing with Andersen. If they somehow learned how to get ideas across to her and get more ideas back, there couldn't really be anything wrong with that. But... but they woud then be having a conversation with her, like she was a person as much as they were people, and the question was... the question was, if she was a person, what did that mean?

In the meantime, the team did nothing. Ian cautioned them that they really couldn't do anything with this newfound knowledge until they had made it know to the rest of the world, and fortunately the rest of the team agreed to wait. Ian first had to write the report on the discovery. 

This was submitted, published, found by news agents, and featured in another small round of Andersen - related headlines. That, and the footage that Sara uploaded for the world to see, resulted in another boost in popularity for the mermaid. 

And a renewed round of criticism. They'd gotten criticism before -- people who said that the mermaid needed to be on display for the public to see, or people who said that learning about the mermaids was bad because they'd clearly been hidden for so long because God didn't want people to know about them, or people who said the whole entire thing was a hoax -- but these were all often criticisms of exciting scientific studies. This new criticism was different.

People had had the same thoughts as Ian. If Andersen was showing herself to be capable of conversation, not just communication, then that meant she was a person. And that meant they were imprisoning her. 

It was a small group, but very vocal. And they made Ian uncomfortable. He was desperate to learn more about the mermaid, and he was absolutely certain that they were not "imprisoning" Andersen, and he didn't want anything new to come to light that would make him less certain. In a way, the critics helped. Every time Ian heard something from one of them, he got defensive. And every time he got defensive, he found more and more justifications for what they were doing with Andersen.

Because of course she wasn't a person. Of course. 

That didn't stop him from still trying to talk to her every day. 

And, in the end, he did find a petsitter to take care of his animals while he spent nights in a cot set up in the lab. 

Perhaps he shouldn't have done that. 

Andersen didn't seem to mind the change. In fact, she seemed to be very happy that he was now staying there with her. The I'm lonely song that she had sung once before never repeated itself in the middle of the night. Instead, she greeted Ian every evening when he came in with an I'm happy to see you song and then later sang a Good night song. And Ian, unable to resist, would talk back.

And he voiced his thoughts on the situation. He said things like, "I shouldn't be really talking to you, should I? You clearly don't understand me, do you?" He said these things sadly. 

One time, after a week or so of this, he was woken up in the middle of the night by Andersen's singing. It was an extremely loud song, so it was somewhat amazing that he managed to sleep through so much of it. But it was full of deep low notes, notes that crept into his ears and played across his mind without him truly noticing them for a long time.