NationStates Jolt Archive


The Risen Tide: Attack of the Killer Seaweed (open, special setting, future)

Tahar Joblis
12-07-2007, 04:09
OOC thread. (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=532630)

In the distant past, humanity counted its world wars. For a time, it seemed as if open nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare would bring down civilization, as if kinetic strikes from low-orbit satellitres would pockmark the blue-green gem forever; however, what historians would later call "The Vonnegut Case" eventually prevailed. The combination of uncontrolled population growth, violent weather, and a rapidly rising sea level was named for a long-forgotten prophet who lived in the murky period of history between the French Revolution and the poorly-recorded Fourth World War.

By the time of the computer-devouring airborne spores, cometary attacks, and macroplagues of the Eleventh World War, the world was 90% covered in water.

Human* population had peaked at forty billion; demographic experts estimated it had declined to less than ten, hammered by ecological catastrophe and a sharp decline in technology by the time the first seaweed sighting was made. Many low-lying nations had sunk under the waves; many others had regressed to within a century of the technological base Vonnegut had forecast from.

Among the sunken states were numbered the islands and reefs of Tahar Joblis. To this day, fishermen remain uneasy in the mid-ocean shallows that mark its sinking place, and nomadic boat people identifying as Tahar Joblissans remain tight-lipped about why they have no bit of land on a map to call their own. The handful of traditional great powers, for the most part, were no longer concerned with the matter, contending among themselves for supremacy over ever-smaller pieces of land and tightly concentrated super-cities.

Other nations concerned themselves with finding and acquiring technology. Knowledge, not wealth or size, was the key to enduring power, after all, and the treasures of the ages were lying around if only you knew where to dig the libraries up from.

In space, among the planets and stars - or above the grass, depending on your perspective - humanity had succeeded in spreading well. Nothing to equal its homeworld, and by all estimates, between a quarter and half of humanity still lived on that tropical ocean world. The last of the huge multi-kilometer relativistic generation ships had departed two hundred years ago, but smaller ships continued to rocket about above the grass. Nothing moved faster than light, but for those with patience, that didn't matter.

In space, too, there were some nomadic Tahar Joblissans wandering around. Nothing important, really; nosy hippies concerned with a dead way of life. Some sort of anachronistic space gypsies risking their lives needlessly.

It looked, reflected the unfortunate and unaware fisherman, like a brick had grown moss and been thrown into the ocean. Hardly the first strange thing he'd seen in these waters, but the mid-ocean shallows were good fishing in spite of all the ghost stories. Maybe because of all the ghost stories - less competition for the fish. He checked his sonar display, a weathered Apple product dating from the post-Ninth WW fishing boom. Heck, looked like there were some schools of armfish coming straight towards that awkward knot of weeds. Good eating, those, he mused to himself, turning on his motor...

*And humanoid variant, if anyone cares about that.
Tahar Joblis
13-07-2007, 03:49
The motor sputtered, and then whined. The propeller was jammed. The fisherman switched it off and went to see just what it had gotten tangled in.

Huh. That's funny... Some strange sort of long fibers were tangled in the blades, wound tightly by the brief spurt of motion.

The rectangular mat of seaweed drifted closer. An instinctual haste set into the human's efforts to free his boat, and then he and his boat vanished in a spray of water.

By the time the spray cleared, both had vanished. The two halves of the boat would wash ashore two weeks later and a thousand miles away, blown by a passing summer storm; this was to be the first life claimed by the killer seaweed.

In the mean time, Seven St. Saint, born of the St. Saint line marriage and trained as a plant psychologist, was making his first solo landfall.

This is not to say that Seven was a spacefarer; Seven had lived his entire life on the ocean, not the great void, and at twenty nine years of age, had constructed his own one-man vessel in what seemed like a late case of adolescent wanderlust.

The modern reader may be tempted to ask: Aren't all those sea gypsies struck by wanderlust? First, I'll tell you, "gypsy" is not the proper term. What the Roma, or gypsies, are up to these days is interesting, surely, but we're not talking about them. Besides, wanderlust isn't really about changing place so much as changing community. A migrating community moves because it is supposed to move; it's not dispersing into new communities, as those wandering adolescents are wont to.