Prompt: Mermaids exist within our oceans, and Atlantis is starting to fill up with plastic.
The Choking came suddenly, little bits of diaphanous material that spun around the water, invisible, that tangled up in throats, that disguised itself as krill and killed sea creatures from the inside out.
At first, the merfolk dismissed it. “Just another surface dweller experiment,” they said, shaking their heads at the primitive inventions of their oversea counterparts.
But tides cam and tides went, and the Earth rotated around its axis, and the Choking kept coming. It filled up the stomachs of the seabirds and chocked the turtles and merfolk would come back from their days of exploration with cuts on their legs and their tales. It began to collect in the gears of the great Atlantis machines and engineers had to be sent down to wrestle it out. It clogged up the hydroponic farms. It got slowed their generators. There were even worse tails, ones that were shared through whispers and worried looks. There were tiny pieces of Choking, too small to see, but large enough to get caught in a gill and kill a mermaid, bam, just like that, no warning.
In those days, the merfolk feared the Choking. The priests said that it was a sign from the Great Dwellers below, that it was a punishment. Signs were traced in algae outside apartment doors. Elaborate necklaces were made, that protected the gills, while still looking fashionable. Children woke up late at night to hear their families whispering, about the coming end, about what they were going to do, about abandoning Atlantis.
But the Choking was everywhere, from the beaches to the icebergs to the deep sea trenches where strange, luminescent merfolk lived, apart from the rest of their kind. There was no escape, except for the one whispered of by the most radical Preachers, the world above the surface world, a world dark and pinpricked with light, where there lay vast worlds of only water, with no land to be found. Merfolk dies and burial mounds filled up with kelp, each strand representing a loved one. Mourning songs filled the coral halls of Atlantis.
Then the merfolk were angry. They planned attacks on the surface world, using the waves as their weapons, creating tsunamis. But after such attacks, the pollution grew worse, with surface debris filling the currents, smothering fish. The ocean grew hotter and sicker. Strange, wrong-covered algaes blocked out the light. These algaes were also attacked, but the attackers died, found floating several tides later, their bodies covered with strange diseases.
After the anger came mourning. The streets of Atlantis were quiet now. The survivors, merfolk and sea creature alike floated listlessly, nodding to one another with the grim recognition of survivors. The generators stopped working for days at a time, the city plunged into darkness. The merfolk got used to living with only the light of bioluminescent pets. The hydroponic farms grew weak and sickly, and the merfolk grew sickly as well, subsisting off shriveled seaweed and disintegrating kelp. Their great machines, which kept time and made music and created art, had long sat dormant in the city square. There were only stories of beauty now, of life, and the merfolk told them to each other, sad smiles on their lips. It was a time of remembering, but not a time of living.
Finally the merfolk, the scattered remainder, the descendants of that lost and melancholic generation, grew hopeful. They gathered in small but determined groups, among the graveyards that used to be coral forests. “We cannot defeat this,” some said. “Though our ancestors tried. We must learn to live with it.”
And those merfolk began to build, working off the plans that were stored in the Great Atlantis Library. They built and they tore down and they modified, and finally, they created. Great new machined began to fill the city square, but these ones were not machines of art-making, but rather ones of survival. These machines took Choking from the air and transformed it into electricity that turned the lights of Atlantis on again. Other machines surrounded the cities, great sweeping nets that captured the Choking, so that merfolk could collect it. Still more machines translated Choking into building materials and soon art began to appear on the streets again, soon coral forest were rebuilt, with artificial skeletons.
Other merfolk did think the Choking could be beaten, could be gotten rid of, though not with bone spears or electric weapons. These merfolk discarded the stories of the ancestors, the stories that had come before Choking. These stories advised the merfolk to stick to themselves, to never go near the surface world. But now, the surface had come to them, had wrapped its arms around their gills. And so, these merfolk swam up to the surface, beached themselves on rocky shores. There was Choking here too, littering the beaches, in screaming colors. Humans, so clumsy looking, so ungraceful, gaped at the merfolk, held up strange contraptions, began to run toward them.
The merfolk, their tails wrapped in nets and Chocking, their hair slick with oil, held out their hands. It was not a gesture of submission, although their scales were dull and their bodies shriveled. It was an invitation.
Come with us, their outstretched hands said, let us show you a better world.
