When I came to I was on the patio deck of the Eureka, with Valerie and her parent gathered around me. Thinking they were rescuing me from drowning they had dragged me on board their yacht, where they tried to remove my “fake” tail and discovered the truth about me. So much for my people's Prime Directive of never letting yourself be seen by humans. I was a bad, bad mermaid!

But this wasn't quite the disaster it could of been. Although they'd found out about me, any trouble this family might bring down on my adopted species was a long ways off. They weren't exactly from around here. It seems that pirates aren't the only ones who can make a wrong turn in the Bermuda Triangle...

OFF THE DEEP END ~ CHAPTER 9
THE LITTLE HUMAN Part 3: EUREKA!!!
Laika Pupkino ~ 2016

.

I drifted through interstellar space, a region of total blackness that no star's light had ever touched. From far away I could hear urgent voices:

"Hold her; hold her... Now lift.

Let's bring her over here. Valli, go get the first aid kit!

Should we be moving her? Her back could be hurt. Her neck.

After what it took to just get her on board it's a bit late to worry about that.

Here it is Daddy. She gonna be okay?

I don't know, she took quite a hit.

Where's her air tank?

On the seafloor someplace, I guess. Must've come off during the fight...

She doesn't need one, Daddy! She's-

Valerie! Stop it!

But-

She must've broken her legs. They shouldn't bend like that.

No they sure shouldn't. We'd better get this tail off her.

But Daddy-

Dammit, Valli! This is no time for your foolishness! I don't understand this thing, where's the release button?

Maybe it's under this ribbon...

But I told you! Her tail doesn't come off! She's REAL!

What is this... gauze?

And I told you, there's no such thing as mermai- WHOAH!!!

OH MY GAAAAAWWD!!!" .I heard a woman scream before the perfect darkness carried the voices out of range...
.

.
THURSDAY AUGUST 28, 2014... Noon-ish
.

I'd seen it done in comedies, but I'd never been woken up by someone tossing water at my face before. Even though I could breathe either air or water the combination made me cough and sputter...

"Splupp!! Hack!! Koff!! What are you doing?!?”

“Making sure you don't dry out,” said the woman with the now-empty plastic bucket.

“Thank you, but I'm not a dolphin. I can survive on land, or...” I looked around and took in my surroundings, “...or on a boat.”

I was on the deck of the white yacht that had been following me around since yesterday, in a sort of patio area near the boat's back end that was more spacious than some backyards I've been in. As I lifted myself up onto my elbows I noticed that I had on my red Hussong's Cantina shirt.

This wasn't what I'd been wearing, was it?!

No, that was yesterday. Today I had those starfish...

“Well I didn't know. I've never met a-” she hesitated, “-anyone like you before.”

“Well you've met one now. I'm Enomena, I'm a mermaid!” I said and stuck out my hand, letting her know that 'mermaid' wasn't one of those presumably innocent words that you find out are horribly offensive to the race, ethnicity or species that you just accidentally insulted.
.

.
)))========> EUREKA
.

Scattered around me on the deck were my sister's neon green backpack, my olive-drab canvas belt, a chewed-up pink motorized mermaid tail and a white enameled steel box with a red cross on it- their first aid kit.

Valerie's parents were standing over me, looking concerned---her father waving a device over my head that looked like a cell-phone with a funnel jutting from the end of it---while Valerie sat in one of the two turquoise chaise lounges that they'd lain me alongside of. She was holding my tartan bandage, which she'd been running through her hands like a string of prayer beads.

“I'm Phyllis,” said the woman, looking a bit dazed as she reached out and shook my hand. She was out of her bright red wet suit and was wearing rattan sandals, a colorful Hawaiian print sundress with spaghetti straps, and red-with-white-polka-dot plastic sunglasses that had a tiny Minnie Mouse etched into the corner of one of the big round lenses. Probably a souvenir from that Disney park they'd visited just before they got thrown back in time.

“Hi! And I'm Tom. We're the Rosados,” said the man. He was barefoot, in just a pair of corduroy shorts, and looked reasonably fit. The hair on his head was jet black but the hair on his chest had quite a bit of grey in it.

“Glad to meet you,” I said as he shook my hand, then I pointed at the gizmo in his other hand, “What is that? Like a tricorder?”

“No, it's a medical scanner. I thought it would at least work on your top half, but it keeps telling me 'UNKNOWN ANIMAL, UNABLE TO SCAN...' Cheap piece of crap!”

“Well you can't really expect it to have mermaids in its data base,” I said.

“I suppose not,” he said, a puzzled expression crossing his face for a second, like I was a monkey that had started quoting... well, anybody. He made one last attempt to scan me with his tricorder thing before opening the first aid kit and dropping it inside, then nodded toward his daughter, “And I guess you've met Valerie.”

“Hey Mermaid! I'm glad you didn't get ate up.”

She grinned at that, then her face darkened, “We were holy worried about you!”

Tom said, “Worried that you'd drowned. You were out cold when we pulled you on board. Then we realized that you couldn't drown.”

“I told you she was real,” Valerie scolded them.

“Yes you did, Pumpkin,” said her dad with an apologetic smile. “And it was quite a shock when we found out!”

“Surprise! Mermaids are real!!” sang Valerie, quoting her new hero.

I got a laugh from Mr. and Mrs. Rosado when I said, “I hope you guys realize you're never gonna hear the end of this.”

“That's all right. She can tell us I-told-you-so as much as she wants,” smiled Tom, his eyes glistening. He was happy to hear anything from his daughter after almost losing her.

Of the three of them, Phyllis was the only one I would've instantly guessed was from Boston by her accent. She said, “Drowning might not be a problem for you but we were still afraid you could have been hurt. And without being able to get a scanner reading all we could do was wait. You really had us worried, the way you were drifting in and out, calling out 'Mom! Dad! I'm sorry!' But don't worry, you'll be back swimming around with your family soon enough.”

'Not with that family,' I thought glumly. And suddenly I remembered part of one of those anxious disjointed dreams I'd had when I was unconscious:

I had somehow gotten home to our house in Dover. It was a pitch black night, and I was in the front yard. I was human again---except I was female this time---and I was running desperately, trying to get up to my front porch where my mom and dad stood, calling out to me from under the dull yellow glow of the porch light. But our whole front lawn was rolling in the opposite direction like a treadmill, slowly at first but then picking up speed, until it was going faster than I could run and started carrying me backwards, my parents' cries of “Suuuuuuuuzie!” growing fainter as my house got farther and farther away across that endless plain of darkness...

My t-shirt was soaked. I pried it away from my chest, where it was leaving little to the imagination, and let it settle back down a bit less snugly. They must have gotten it out of their laundry room and put it on me while I was knocked out. My little starfish friends had abandoned me when I decided to take on that hammerhead, which was fine by me. They hadn't signed up to die with me, and as brave as they might be facing creatures their own size there's not much they could have done to help me fight that shark.

I said, “Thank you for dressing me.”

“Yes, Valerie and I did that,” said Phyllis, her emphasis meaning that Tom had been elsewhere or had turned his back while they did it.

Valerie's mom seemed like a very nice woman, but I could sense that my being this not-quite-a-person, from a world she knew nothing about was something that never left her mind for a second. There was no malice in it, no suspiciousness about me or my intentions; just the awkwardness of being unsure how to “be” around a mermaid. And then feeling awkward about feeling awkward; and then being afraid that all this awkwardness would be picked up on, and interpreted as a sign of some ugly species-ist sentiment that wasn't how she really felt at all...

“So how's your legs?” I asked Valerie.

“Sore! But my tail protected them. How's your head?”

“Feels like it got run over by a truck,” I said. I moved my arms around, turned my head left and right, arched my back, lifted my tail and let it flop down, announcing: “But nothing got broken, so I'm good.”

“That eye sure looks like it could use an ice pack, though,” said Phyllis.

I explored my face with my fingers. The flesh around my right eye felt puffy and tender, but it was my left one that was really puffed up, on its way to becoming one hellacious black eye.

“Yes please,” I said, “I think I'd like that.”

“I got it,” said Valerie, jumping up out of her seat.

“Use one of the medium freezer bags. About half full,” said her mom. The Eureka's multi-story superstructure had a big porch-like opening. She ran into it and down a hallway that sloped down into the lower decks.

“Her legs seem fine,” Tom noted, which got a nod and a smile from Phyllis. They were lucky they hadn't witnessed what I had. When that hammerhead chomped down on her tail I was sure her legs were being bitten clean off. A moment of helpless nausea and horror that I don't think I'll ever forget.

Sitting up like I was, the tiny Lego-block bumps of the deck's white non-skid surface were digging into my elbows. I wriggled over to the chaise lounge next to Valerie's and tried to climb into it. With its heavy turquoise rubber webbing and frame of dense clear lucite it was a lot more substantial than the cheap aluminum one in our castle's infirmary, but it was still light enough that the other end rose up when I put my weight on the foot of it.

“Here,” said Tom, holding the back end of it for me.

“Thanks,” I grunted as I hauled myself up into it.

He grabbed a pair of deck chairs that matched the two loungers and put them into a circle with them. He and Phyllis sat down just as Valerie came running back. She handed me the bag of ice and dropped back into her seat.

I unzipped the top of the baggie and popped one of the little crescents of ice into my mouth.

“No,” said Phyllis, “You're suppose to press the whole bag against your eye.”

“I know. I just really miss this stuff. We don't see much ice around here.”

“I guess you wouldn't,” she said. “Now it looks like you're going to have two black eyes, but I'm glad this was all that happened to you. I don't know what we would do if you had a concussion or something.”

“Well I'm lucky I have such a thick skull,” I said, and mimed knocking on my head before pressing the bag to the sorer of my two messed up eyes.

Valerie giggled. “Her head's thick all right!”

“That's not nice,” frowned Phyllis.

“But she said it first!”

“It's still not nice.”

“It's okay,” I told Phyllis, “I did say that.”

“Yeah she did!” snickered Valerie, and began chanting, "Thick! Thick! Thick! Thick-”

“Enough, Valli! That's just rude.”

But the kid was on a roll: “Her head is soooooo THICK!! She's Miss Thick, Thick, Thickety-Thickhead from Thicksburg, Thicksylvania.... And so's her dad!”

“VALERIE!!”

“I was just joking,” she whined.

“It's all right. Valli and I can joke around. We went through the Shark Wars together.”

“Shar-r-r-r-r-kkkk WARS!!” growled Valerie dramatically, and started making machine gun and explosion noises.

“Yes, we get the idea,” scowled Tom, which made her stop. And to me he said, “I wish we had a Shark Wars medal we could give you. That was a very brave thing you did coming to her rescue like that.”

“You're really the one that saved her though,” I said. “You had that taser gun. Saved both of us, probably.”

“But if you hadn't done that I wouldn't have got there in time, even with my fin-props going full out. It was quite a sight seeing you wrestling that big ugly thing bare handed!”

“I did have a cricket bat to hit him with. Or I did until he chewed it up. And a pretty big knife-” I said, and glanced over at my belt that was lying on the deck. Its scabbard was empty. “I don't suppose you've seen a knife, have you? Real fancy and old looking, gold; with a hilt shaped like seahorse?”

Nope, sorry, both parents said, making my heart sink. I'd been hoping they'd simply relieved me of it while I was out, not knowing what kind of crazed barbarian warrior mermaid would be waking up on the deck of their boat.

“But a club, a knife... Those aren't much when you're going up against a big predator like that,” said Tom.

“No, they sure aren't. That's why I usually try a more diplomatic approach with them, using my supposed authority as a Ruler of the Seas.”

“As a what?”

“She's a princess, Daddy! Her family runs the whole ocean and they can give orders to all the fish and the whales and even the seagulls!”

“Really?!” asked Tom. He wasn't too sure he believed this.

“We met the Duchess of York when we were in England,” said Phyllis, like this was supposed to mean something to me.

“Well tell her I said Hi!” I said.

“Fergie's tea tasted weird,” complained Valerie, “And she smelled funny!”

“You'll probably smell funny too when you're ninety years old,” her Mom admonished her.

“I liked when we went to Stonehenge better. They had hot dogs there. And that ghost train where all the skeletons and things jumped out, and those dodgem bumper cars!”

“So how should we address you?” asked Phyllis in that weird reverent tone that I'd been hoping I could get away from up here. “Your Grace? Your Majesty?”

“Anything is fine. 'Your Highness'... 'Hey Boogerhead'... Anything but 'Dude'.”

Valerie giggled. “Hey Boogerhead!”

“Yeah, Boogerhead?”

“Don't encourage her,” sighed Tom.

“So you can actually talk to fish?” asked Phyllis.

“Honey, that's not even remotely possible,” said Tom, a bit embarrassed that his wife would ask such a dumb question.

“But she can!” shouted Valerie, “She holy can! She took me around the corals to meet all the different little fishes and things, and I talked to a dolphin who could read the words on my texter!”

Tom turned to me, “Is that true?”

“As absurd as it sounds,” I said, shrugging in apology for my illogical world.

He laughed---a sharp, stressed-out bark---and said, “Sure! Why not?! Mermaids! Talking dolphins! Bermuda Triangle Time Portals! And I suppose that one's real too?”

“I'm afraid so...”

Phyllis said, “But I thought they'd decided time travel wasn't possible.”

“Who decided this?” frowned Tom.

“Well DAISY for one. She said so on DAISY'S WORLD OF SCIENCE last week.”

“DAISY's also always pointing out that she's not infallible; and says: 'Mistakes are the Universe's way of keeping us humble...' And us being in 2014 sure would explain a lot. We'll know for sure when I get on the internet. Which I'm going to do here in a minute, we just had to make sure you girls were alright first. How's the head, Enomena?”

“I'll survive. I'll just pop a couple of aspirin when I get home,” I said, gesturing with my bag of ice. As I settled it back on my eye it bumped my nose, setting off a flare of pain. My pretty new nose sure was taking its lumps this week.

“Can you take acetoprofenex?” asked Phyllis, reaching over and snagging the first aid kit.

“Unless the label says those are okay to give to a fish I'd better not risk it. My physiology's kind of a strange mixed bag.”

“She has a air bubble in her tummy that can EXPLODE!!!” announced Valerie gleefully.

“Oh dear!” said Phyllis, and set the box back down.

“Hey, can I get myself a coke?” asked Valerie.

“Sure,” said Phyllis, “If you'll bring me a glass of my tea. And a Henry Chinaski's Private Reserve for your father. And what would you like, Enomena? Tea? Water? Milk?”

“Actually a coke sounds pretty good.”

“Back in a blinky,” said Valerie, jumping up and running off through the boat's porch thing again.

Phyllis smiled in the direction of her departing daughter, “She sure has taken a shine to you. Meeting a real mermaid, it's a dream come true for her.”

“I like her too. She's a great kid!”

“We're pretty happy with her,” said Tom, “And again, I can't thank you enough for coming to her rescue like that. You didn't have to do that.”

“I really did, though.”

“But I mean, she's not even your own kind.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “But she's my friend. I'm going through a strange transition phase in my life right now, and I need every friend I've got. I can't afford to have them getting eaten.”

“I see,” Tom grinned sardonically, “Strictly self-serving then.”

“We're your friends!” said Phyllis, leaning forward and hesitantly patting my tail. It was a gesture I really appreciated, since fish-people seemed like something from way outside her comfort zone...
.

.
)))========> THE MERMAID'S PRIME DIRECTIVE
.

So here we were, me and the Rosados, just chilling on the deck of their boat...

“You never know what a 'harmless' encounter with a human will turn into,” Jasper had warned me. My anonymity was compromised in just about the worst possible way here. If my mermaid mom ever found out about this she might find a use for those dungeons she never used. I was such a damned screw up!

“What's wrong? Are you feeling okay?!” asked Phyllis, who must have seen me make a face.

“I'm fine. Just kind of mad at myself.”

“For what?”

“Well you see, we have this rule---and for us mermaids it's like the biggest rule there is---that we're never supposed to have any contact with humans, or even let them see us. I sure blew that one!”

Valerie was back, carrying a tray with all our drinks on it. Legs telescoped out of the tray's bottom, turning it into a low table that she set down in the middle of the circle of chairs, “But it's okay that I saw you, right? Because I took the Mermaid Pledge.”

“It wasn't okay for me to let you see me, but that wasn't your fault,” I said as I took the can of soda she handed me. The familiar Coke logo had been redone in an odd angular connect-the-dots style, reminiscent of a circuit board. I didn't see any pull tab on the top but there was a clear plastic spot, which I put my sturdy, sharp talon of a thumbnail against and pushed. And then pushed really hard. It just wouldn't break!

“So what's the Mermaid Pledge?” Phyllis asked her daughter.

Valerie tapped the clear spot on hers three times, two times and then once and took a drink. I tapped mine the same way and watched a circular hole spread itself open for me; like some weird living orifice opening. It was kind of creepy. The cola was shockingly sweet to my mermaid taste buds but I did enjoy the fizziness of it.

“It was this thing Princess Enomena made me say, all important and official and everything---a sacred oaf---that made me an ornerary mermaid, and a princess, and a citizen of Hysteria! I just had to promise to eat my vegetables and do my homework and always cross at the light, and never tell anyone there's real mermaids. Only I guess I can tell you now, and she said I could tell Wendy too, because she's my best friend and she believes me about stuff,” said Valerie. She turned to me, concerned, “I still can, can't I?”

“You can. But you'll have to make Wendy take the Mermaid Pledge. As a Deputy Mermaid Princess First Class you're authorized to make up your own version.”

“I suppose you'll need Phyllis and me to take this pledge too,” said Tom, sounding amused; like he got that I'd found myself in a jam with Valerie and had made the whole 'mermaid pledge' thing up on the spot.

Valerie snapped at them: “You better! 'Cause if you don't it could be all horrible for mermaids, like the way General Stoneheart and his Ultramega Squad are always after the Stratosfairies!”

“That's a cartoon series Valli watches. Fairies aren't some real thing in 2050,” explained Tom.

“Oh, there's real ones!" said Valerie, "They have the same little antenna dealies on their heads and pokitty ears like the Stratosfairies have, only they're way smaller. At least the ones I saw were. And zingy zowie, can they fly fast!"

I smiled at her, like I wasn't ruling the existence of fairies out at this point (plus I think Mom had mentioned the fae folk avoiding contact with humans in one of her rants...), but neither of Valli's parents chose to hear her claim.

Phyllis frowned, “I don't know that it's good to let kids to watch that show. It's probably fine now that she's almost ten, but I know when she was younger it used to give her nightmares.”

“I watched most of the second season with her and I'll admit I enjoyed it,” said Tom, “Except for those fairy cities up in the clouds it seemed quite realistic. A good reminder of what America might be like if idiots like Senator Greenspooner and that Victory For Values mob were running everything. And boy do they want to!”

“I realize that,” Phyllis told him, “I do remember the Twenties- all that awfulness with the 28th Amendment and all those crazy 'normalcy laws'. But to me a show that's about fairies should be cute, magical; a sense of wonder... Like those Tinkerbell ones I use to watch when I was little. Not all pessimistic and dark like that!”

“I can't say what it 'should' be. I was just agreeing with Valli, that it's a good illustration of why mermaids like Enomena would want to keep themselves hidden.”

I sighed. “Keeping hidden doesn't seem to be something I'm very good at. Hell, I might as well start charging admission: 'COME SEE THE AMAZING MERMAID- FIVE DOLLARS!'”

“I don't suppose you have change for a twenty, do you?” asked Tom, pretending to reach for his wallet.

“Sorry, not on me.”

“And you wouldn't be able to use our money anyway. They weren't putting advertisements on U.S. currency yet in this decade. But in all seriousness, I really would like to give you something for taking that shark on like that. Some kind of reward...”

“I don't know... Getting a 'reward' for doing that just doesn't seem right somehow. All I really want from you is that promise that you'll never tell-”

“You've got it!” said Tom.

“Absolutely,” said Phyllis, “Not a word about any of this to anyone, ever!”

Somehow I believed them. I smiled, “Well that was easy!”

“And they wouldn't have given us both XYZ clearance ratings if we weren't able to keep secrets,” she said.

For a second I wondered if they were CIA agents or something, until: “Oh! For that Big Brain Project.”

“That's the one,” said Tom.

“But you still haven't took the Pledge!” insisted Valerie.

“All right, let's make this legal,” said Tom, and he and his wife raised their right hands.
.

.
)))========> A STEPFATHER'S LOVE
.

The version of my pledge that I ran her parents through didn't much resemble the one I'd made Valerie say, but it seemed to satisfy her. When we finished she cried, “YAAAAAYYYY!!! Now we're all mermaids!”

“Oh Joy!" said Mr. Rosado, rolling his eyes. “Now If you ladies will excuse me, I think I've figured out how I can link up with one of those old broadband satellites and find out about this 2014 business.”

“It's true, Daddy!”

“I'm pretty sure you're right, Mija,” he said, “And that's what I'm afraid of. Because if we really have gone back thirty-six years that means we don't have any valid ID's, any money, any contacts.”

“We still have our 'Ultimate Emergency Fund',” Phyllis reminded him.

“That's right! But what's gold even going for in 2014?”

“Around twelve hundred dollars for a troy ounce. American dollars, that is. I don't know about Canadian or Australian.”

Tom looked at me appraisingly. “You seem to know a lot about the human world for not having any contact with it.”

“I know more about it than most mermaids,” I said, “It's this whole wild crazy story that-”

“I don't think I can handle any more crazy stories right now! I'll take your word for it,” said Tom as he stood up, “So right around fifty thousand dollars. And that'll buy us a lot more in these pre-inflation days. We've been in worse financial shape. But let's try to get home before we go breaking into that. I'll be back in twenty minutes, a half hour... It was very nice meeting you Enomena. Interesting.”

“You too!”

“And I know your feelings about the whole 'reward' business, but at least let me give you a dive knife to replace the one you lost. Not to put some cash value on what you did, but as a gift. From the heart...” he said. He glanced over at his daughter and his voice went husky, “Because... because I don't... don't know what I would have done, if-”

He stopped, his face contorting, like he was afraid that any further words might bring tears with them.

I can understand why someone who is invested in “being a man” might not want anyone to see them crying because they were afraid, or they got yelled at, or over something dumb like losing a golf match. But crying from the pure relief of having escaped a tragedy like losing your child? Tears like those seem appropriate for anybody, at any time. I decided to push him over the edge.

Valerie was watching him, her expression one of pure love and devotion. I whispered, “Don't just sit there, go hug him!”

She jumped up, grabbed him, and pressed her cheek against his ribs. He hugged her back, buried his face in her hair. Crying freely now, murmuring stuff like “my baby” and “precious angel”.

“You saved me Daddy! I was so scared!” hiccuped Valerie, crying tears of her own, which made him cry even harder.

Step-parents seem to be portrayed as the bad guys in a lot of stories and films, but Tom here was like a poster boy for just how loving a father a step-dad can be. Phyllis gave me a big nod---You did good!---and a second later had her arms around the both of them.

When their family hug finally broke up Tom's face was wet, but he was past caring who saw it. He had a great big quivering smile on his face as he went inside.
.

The computer must not have been too far below decks, because about two minutes later we heard his voice ringing out through the porchway opening: “AY CHINGADO!!!”
.

.
)))=====> STORY TIME
.

The shirt I was wearing was almost dry, and my soda was empty. Valerie ran inside to grab us each another one. She must have ran the whole way back too because when I tapped mine in the 3-2-1 sequence about half its contents shot all over me. Valli thought this was absolutely hilarious.

“You boogerhead!” wasn't my first choice of things to call her but Mom was sitting right here. “You don't run with soda!”

“I was just helping keep you wet,” she giggled, then opened hers at arm's length, letting it geyser harmlessly all over the deck.

Phyllis watched me take a big drink of my coke and said, “I hope we're not corrupting you, giving you a taste for caffeine and sugar.”

“You're not. I was already hopelessly addicted. I've been jonesing for a diet Dr. Pepper all week!”

“But where would a mermaid get soda pop?”

“That's the thing,” I said, “Until a few days ago I was as human as you are.”

“What?!?” she gasped, like she couldn't possibly have heard that right.

“It's true. I was born a human, from human parent. I lived in the suburbs, had an X-Box and a mountain bike and a little over four hundred bucks in the bank; and was supposed to be starting tenth grade at our new high school next week.”

She looked me up and down, searching for signs of whatever mad-scientist surgery had turned me into a mermaid. “But what happened?!!”

“It was magic!” exclaimed Valerie.

“I'm not too sure how the transformation worked,” I hedged, “Just that it did. And it saved my life. I was out in the middle of the ocean---and drowning---probably not too far from here, when this mermaid came and tried to rescue me.”

“Did you fall off a boat?” asked Phyllis.

“Actually I jumped. But I pretty much had to,” I told her. And after a bit of disclaimer-stuff about how crazy this was all going to sound I started: “Back on Sunday I was on vacation with my mom and dad, at a campground on the coast of Florida. I was laying out on my towel on kind of an isolated part of the beach when these pirates, who I didn't even think were real pirates at first-”

I gave them the story of my week pretty much as it happened, except for avoiding the word “genie” and instead calling the blue guy an “entity”; implying that he might have been some alien who possessed some of that indistinguishable-from-magic-type advanced technology; which to me just seemed more believable.

I yacked for maybe a half hour, stopping for the occasional question---“So you were a girlboy like Wendy and now you're a mermaid? Oh man, she is gonna be sooooo jealous!”---or a comment---“I'm sorry we put you through that, and am so glad neither of you were hurt jumping off that cliff!”---or a cry of astonishment from the web-browsing father---“JESUS H. CHRIST IN A JETPACK!!!”---who sounded like he was somewhere up near the front of the boat.

The stuff about my having been a boy didn't phase Phyllis. Transgender seemed like a notion she had been comfortable with even before she met Wendy. But what I could tell she hadn't been 100% comfortable with was the fact of me being a mermaid. Even though she'd been doing her best to treat me like a regular teenage girl from down the block, there was always that slight edge of hesitancy and seeming ill-at-ease...

Because now that she knew I actually was a teenager more or less from down the block (who through a bizarre mishap had lost her legs and grown a tail...) all that carefulness about what she said to me just fell away, and we both relaxed a lot more.

Since I was wearing half of my second soda I had run out of beverage before I ran out of story. Phyllis saw me tilting my head back to get the last drop and asked, “Do you need another Coke, Enomena?”

“Maybe just some water. But I can wait a bit.”

“And oh! Where are my manners?! Would you care for something to eat? We're not eating lunch, but I could sure make you something,” she smiled. Yes, she was definitely relaxing around me. Doing the good-hostess thing that my land mom always does when my friends came over.

“Thank you! I am sort of hungry.”

“I could heat up some of that cioppino we had last night. Or how about some nice mahi-mahi?”

“Actually just a peanut butter sandwich would be great.”

“Are you sure that's all you want?”

“Or anything that's not fish. That a mermaid wouldn't normally get a chance to eat.”

“Well that makes sense. We'll find you something good. But please, go on...”

I ran them through the last bit of my story, finishing with: “So I saw the taser dart and I let go of the shark just in time, but I guess I didn't move far enough away. The next thing I knew I was waking up here.”

Valerie applauded. To her my story was just a great adventure tale; and she seemed most impressed by things like me and Anee being mermaid princesses, the seashell castle and our talking octopus servants.

But Phyllis had been more affected by some of the the less happy aspects of my story. How I'd been uprooted from my life and tossed into a whole new one, and what this must have meant for my parents: “Those poor people! They must be at wit's end.”

“I know,” I sighed, “If only there was a way to let them know I'm okay.”

“Well there is, isn't there?” asked Valerie.

We both looked at her.

“If Daddy got onto that intranet then why can't you? Even if this is the Oldie Days, the human people here have computers, don't they?”

“Of course!” I practically shouted. “Valli, you're a genius! A boogerghead, but a genius...”
.

.
)))========> THE NEWS FROM 2014
.

We'd been sitting in the shade of the Eureka's bridge, but now the sun was right over us. My ice-pack had somehow migrated to my lap, where it wasn't really doing me any good. I drank all the water out of it and pressed the remaining ice back against my eye.

Valerie was the first to spot her father emerging from the little porchway, “Hi Daddy!”

Tom trudged slowly toward us, looking dazed.

“What's wrong?” asked Phyllis.

“It's true... We're in 2014... August Twenty-eighth to be exact... There's rioting in the town of Ferguson---right near St. Louis---after some leadfinger cop shot a black kid... ISIS is just starting to get a foothold in the Mideast... Vladimir Putin is President of Russia, sending troops into the Ukraine... In North Korea Kim Jong Un is playing with nukes and hasn't started cloning himself yet... Tiger Woods is still a big name in golf---I can't believe how young he looks!---and just won the Pandorica Open... And Orange is apparently the New Black.”

“Oh dear,” said Phyllis. “Well we were sort of expecting this. So what do we do now?”

Valerie recited: “We take the same exact heading you took coming here from Bahama, but backwards.”

“And that weird fog will just be waiting there for us?” asked Phyllis.

“It might just be,” said Tom. “When I was in there I had a crazy idea. I entered 'Bermuda Triangle golden fog time travel' on the old Google search engine, and I actually found something. Exactly one reference. It's from 2011; a site called THE FORTEAN INTELLIGENCER, which was mostly crazy stories about underground cities on the moon and how the big oil companies are suppressing the truth about perpetual motion machines. But there it was: An article called 'The Fog of Time', where they compared all the legends about it over the years and gave their best guess for the coordinates of the 'Bermuda Cross-Temporal Anomaly'. According to them the fog seems to usually show up a little after sunrise or a little after sundown.”

“And that's what those pirates said too!”

Tom stared at me. “So you were kidnapped by pirates? Time traveling pirates?”

“That's when all the weird stuff started, yeah,” I said, figuring he'd overheard that part from downstairs.

His eyes narrowed. “So it is you then...”

“You gotta hear her story, Daddy. It's cra-a-a-a-a-a-azy! It could be a movie!”

“Or a novel,” he muttered cryptically, and then: “That article I printed tells some crazy stories too. But it's the only thing I've found about this... this anomaly; so I guess we'll take its advice. It's a bit late to try to get there by sundown but we can anchor somewhere overnight near where we entered the fog and hope it appears in the morning.”

“So we don't have to leave right now?” asked Phyllis.

“Not for a few hours.”

“Then I can make lunch for Enomena. She wants a peanut butter sandwich. And she needs to use the computer to get a message to her real parents in Dover Delaware.”

“Human parents? And that fits too... Uh, sure. She can use it.”

“Great!” I said, “Just point the way. After yesterday on that island I won't have any problem crawling up and down a flight of steps or two.”

“You don't have to crawl, I'll take you,” said Tom. There was a stack of deck chairs like the two he had set out for him and Phyllis. The bottom chair had little plastic wheels on it so the whole stack could be moved around. He yanked the other chairs off of it and rolled it up next to my lounger.

“Thanks,” I said, and slid over onto the seat. This chair wasn't designed to be used as a mermaid wheelchair, and I had to hold my tail up in front of me as he wheeled me toward the superstructure.

“I assume you know how to use a computer,” he asked.

“Sure, if your computers are anything like the ones we have in 2014.”

“This one is. You'll like it,” he said, “And incidentally, I make a monster peanut butter sandwich!”
.

.
)))========> I NEVER META-FICTION I DIDN'T LIKE
.

We passed through the entryway and into the carpeted hallway that ran down the middle of the boat. It angled steeply downward for a bit before leveling off.

“How old are you, Enomena?”

“Fifteen,” I told him, “I was born in 1999.”

“The same year I was. But here we are, fifteen and fifty years old.”

“I know, it's weird! It's like that special relativity 'twins-paradox', where you stayed here on Earth while I went off on a rocket and did the near-speed-of-light thing.”

“That wouldn't be so weird,” he said, “Or maybe it would, but the physics of that are pretty cut and dry. What's weird is that right now there are two of me! The other me is your age, living back in Franklin County, probably playing HALO or shooting hoops in front of our garage; wondering how my summer vacation went by so quick...”

“You should go look him up and give him an almanac of sports statistics from 2050.”

“That would be a really bad idea,” said Tom gravely, not getting my joke. I guess if he'd ever seen those Back To The Future films it was so long ago that he didn't remember that part.

“And speaking of weird,” I said, “What's the deal with this war against the Technotologists down in Antarctica? That just sounds so.... improbable!”

“I guess it would, if you didn't know the history behind it. But I really don't think I should be talking to you about all this.”

“Valerie already told me a bit about it. Said her brother is down there fighting them. You must be worried about him.”

“Well of course I am. They're saying it will be over in a month, but that's what they said three months ago. The Clearheads have turned ordinary cancer fighting nanobots into this weapon, so our ground forces all have to wear repulsion suits. But that's the future, and... Hey, did you want jelly on that sandwich or just peanut butter?”

We had stopped in a spot where part of the hallway's wall was open, leading into a big kitchen. Most of what I could see in there looked familiar; except for one great big gleaming cylindrical appliance in the center of everything that was either a commercial donut maker or a cyclotron.

“Right now I just want to get that e-mail sent. The sandwich can wait.”

“Okay, but I'm going to grab a beer,” he said, and went into the galley. “Did you want another coke?””

As he opened the refrigerator I saw the tea-colored pitcher sitting on a shelf, “Could I have a glass of that iced tea instead?”

Tom nodded, and set the pitcher on the counter.

“So what's a repulsion suit?” I asked.

“Just a second,” he said. He tapped the cap on his beer bottle three times, twice, and once, and it lifted right off like it had loosened itself. He took a long drink, then looked me right in the face and said, “I'm really sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you not to ask me anything about the future. I'm afraid of the consequences if I tell you too much.”

“You mean you're worried that if I knew certain things about the future I might change history, so nothing will be the same when you get back home?”

He made an odd, frustrated little noise and said, “I don't know! And that's what's so damn scary about all this. If that should be a real concern or if it only happens in movies. I'm information blind here! All I've got to go on is a bunch of science fiction stories, some half-baked hypotheses I've been toying with, and one thirty-six year old blog by some crackpot who calls himself Moby Dick-something that's probably nothing but lies! And so it might be nothing, but-"

“Moby Phillip K. Dick?” I asked. Of course he would be part of all this!

“Yes, that was it. You've heard of him?”

I'd not only heard of him, I knew the man. He was a friend of my father and about the strangest person my family knew (Sorry, Chiro...). But I was afraid anything I might say about that crazy old hippie Gordy Sanders might discourage Mr. Rosado from seeking out what seemed like was their best chance for getting back to their own time, so I lied and said, "Uh, I might have, but I can't remember where."

““Oh,“ he said, “So I don't know whether 'disrupting the timeline' is a real concern or just a movie gimmick, but I don't want to risk it by telling you any more.”

“That's cool. I wouldn't want to make you never be born or something,” I said, imagining one wrong word from him causing this whole boat to suddenly disappear from around me and me falling ker-plunk into the ocean.

Tom filled a glass with ice and poured tea into it, “It's not sweetened. Did you want sugar?”

“I'm kind of sugared out. And it occurs to me that mermaids might not even have a human-type pancreas, so I better cool it until I can go look that up. I don't suppose you have any of that fake stuff, do you?”

“We might,” he said and started rummaging through drawers and cabinets.

“But you know, when it comes to anything you tell me affecting the future you do have one thing in your favor. Me being a mermaid makes the chances of my having any effect on human history pretty slim. We exist in two separate worlds.”

“That's what I was thinking, at first. But if you're who I think you are you won't always be a mermaid. And your getting turned back into a human would mean there will more of a chance of you having an impact on the future than if you kept on living out there.”

“So who is it that you think I am?”

“I saw your book,” he said, “Or I'm pretty sure it was yours. A little over two years from now. I was in high school---my senior year, Class of 2016---and there was this novel some of the kids were raving about. It started out with this boy being abducted by pirates, and then he fell off the boat and turned into a mermaid when he hit the water, or something like that, which she didn't seem to mind at all, and she had all these weird adventures. Just pure fantasy stuff... Or that's what I thought until we met you.”

“Wow!” I said. If this book wasn't my story it was a pretty big coincidence. “What was it called?”

“Around The Bend, Over The Top, something like that. I'd been wondering why this all seemed familiar, and then I remembered,” he said as he continued searching. There were a lot of cabinets and drawers in here. “Damn, I hope she didn't throw it all out!”

“And this book was by Susan Donnelly?”

“I don't remember, it was so long ago. Some girl. Young enough that people were surprised she got published. It wasn't a giant bestseller but it had a certain following at Rydell High. Girls mostly, a few boys. But this wasn't exactly the most progressive part of the country, and none of the guys I hung around with wanted to be seen reading that book. It had all this weird transgender stuff in it. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“But my kid sister had a copy. Said I just had to read it! So I started it one weekend at home and- Ah! Here it is,” he said. Came back out and handed me my tea, his beer to hold for him, and a pastel green packet that said SYNTHA-SWEET on it in whimsical lettering. “They're saying this stuff is bad for you, just like they did about glycodulcinate before they banned that, but I'm sure one of these won't kill you.”

“You started reading it. Did you finish it?”

“Afraid not. It seemed to just ramble all over the place. And about three chapters into the mermaid part I just said screw it. It was too much of the same thing. And WAY too much of that 'Wheeeeee I'm a mermaid! Wheeeeeee I'm a girl! Wheeeeeeeee I have big-' Er, I mean... Not that I thought all the transgender stuff was wrong or anything, I just couldn't relate to it.”

Great... I haven't even written the damn thing and I'm already getting bad reviews!

“Well we don't like to read what we don't like to read,” I shrugged, “I don't have anything against English drawing rooms, personally, but I don't want them in my detective fiction; like all those Mrs. Ambrose mysteries my mom likes. So then you didn't get to the part where she met the human girl and fought the shark and wound up on that parents' ship, talking to Valli's dad about a book he'd read when he was fifteen?”

“If I did, I don't remember,” he said. He got behind my chair. I hefted up my tail and he started pushing me on down the hall, “But I'm pretty sure I'd skipped ahead by then. My sister told me there was outer space stuff later on in the book and that sounded like maybe it would be better; but that part didn't grab me either. I gave it back to Christina. But I do know the main character wasn't a mermaid anymore by the end of it, because she says so at the beginning. So if that really was you, and it wasn't all just some cockamamie fantasy...”

I poured a quarter of the packet of sweetener into my tea. Sipped it. It tasted just about right. “So what do you mean 'space stuff'?”

“Sorry, this was a book I just skimmed through thirty-six years ago. I just seem to recall it had this space ship full dumb aliens that acted like clowns, or maybe they were clowns, and they took pills to make themselves stupid. Or something. But it wasn't nearly as funny as the author seemed to think it was; and the whole thing, all they did was talk, and I just gave up on it," he said. And then tried to take some of the sting out of his criticism: “But then I was a real philistine back then. Even though I was a good student my tastes were pretty simple, crude even. There was lots of dialogue and hardly any danger or excitement in it, and that bored me; but if it was your real story that's probably good. And I know there were a lot of kids who did love it.”

The hallway dipped down again, and ended at a doorway that was open but had a serious steel hatch for a door, with a little porthole window and wheel for a handle, like on a real ship. He tilted my chair back and then forward to get it over the hatchway's bottom lip, and we entered a small, oddly shaped space in the yacht's bow that was fixed up like an Edwardian man-cave: all mahogany and brass, with breakfront bookcases, high back leather chairs, paintings of hunting dogs loping across fields, crystal decanters holding different types of booze, and an antique roll-top desk.

On either side of where the bow came to a point there was a circular window six feet in diameter, showing a view of the ocean just below the surface and flooding the room with greenish light. Now and then the water across their tops would dip down, showing a sliver of blue sky. I'd noticed these yesterday when I was checking out this boat with Anee's spyglass. They explained that heavy steel hatch that his study had for an entrance. Whatever kind of super-tough futuristic material they were made from, if one of them ever did break this room would have to be sealed off in a hurry...

“Wow! Great view,” I said.

“This is everybody's favorite place in the Eureka. Which is funny, because the view-walls in the cabins actually give a much better view of what's happening on the other side of the hull. They're bigger than these, and you can zoom in on something, or go to infrared viewing at night. But there's something about a real glass window-” he pointed, “Hey! Look at that dolphin checking us out. They always look so happy! And what's that hanging around his neck?”

I looked. It was Jasper Five, staring right at me. And no, he did not look happy at all.
.

.
)))========> IDIOT IN A BOX
.

Tom pushed my chair up to his desk and rolled up the top, revealing his computer. It looked surprisingly like my mom's four year old Dell desktop model at home. I hit what was obviously the ON button. The screen came to life, showing the image of Tom, Phyllis, an even younger looking Valerie, and a boy that must have been his son Jimmy all crowded into the oval carriage on the arm of of a carnival octopus ride, which must have been running at full speed, from the expressions on their faces and from the crazy angle that the horizon and all the background stuff were tilted at. Rides and crowds and colorful tents, and beyond these a wet looking grassy field with an arrangement of huge rectangular stones that could only be Stonehenge rising up from it.

I centered the keyboard, moved the mouse to the left side, and said, “Computers sure don't seem to have evolved much in thirty-five years. I thought it would be real tiny, or plug into your brain or something. ”

“They have those. But those are expensive and most folks still don't want to go around with circuitry in their bodies, except maybe a GPS or a medic-alert beacon. This is a retro model, made to look like that one I had as a teenager. I'll leave you to it. If you get in trouble, just holler,” he said, and left.

Just to be sitting in front of a normal piece of human technology again felt so good. I said, “Wow! A computer!”

“Yeah? Whadda ya want, Fishbutt?” asked a voice.

I jumped. “What?!!”

“Sorry, we're all out of 'what',” the thing snickered, “Come back tomorrah.”

Tom hadn't told me it was voice-interactive. I leaned forward, unsure where the microphone was. “What did you call me?”

“You hoid me.... Fishbutt!”

“You are a very rude computer!”

“Hey, dat ain't my fault, I wuz programmed dis way.”

“You sound kind of familiar,” I told it.

“Ya ever watch th' T'ree Stooges?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Oh a wise guy, huh?! My voice was modeled on one o' dem guys. Da handsome one, Coily!”

“And do you have a name?”

“Sure do,” it answered, then was silent.

“What is your name?”

“Now yer catchin' on, Kiddo! I am a WEISENHEIMER 1948 INTERACTIVE VOICE RECOGNITION PROGRAM,” it announced, and then said miserably, “My mudder musta really hated me ta gimme a name like dat!”

“So how is it that you can talk to me?”

“What can I say? I got low standards.”

“No. I mean, I thought only the Chinese had AI.”

“Who, DAISY? Puh-shaaaawww! Maybe she got a thinkerbox that'd makes Einstein look like Mortimer Snerd, but I swear! Dat broad is a real dumb-dora when it comes to deliverin' a joke. She's too intelligent, and way too artificial. To really be funny ya gotta skip the Artificial Intelligence an' go right for the Artificial Stupidity. And I got dat by the boatload!” it boasted. “But I guess dem Chinamen will laugh at anyt'ing. And speakin' of jokes, I got a real knee slapper for you: Ya see, dere was dese three brudders---Ching, Chong and Chang---woikin' in a Chinee laundry. And one day the got this big load o' doity diapers ta wash, see? And-”

“Look, would you just get me on to the internet?”

“Why soitinly- Nyuck! Nyuck!” and the MSN news page came up.

I browsed the MSN page a bit, just reassuring myself that the world up there was going on pretty much like it was when I'd left it. The headlines seemed dominated by news of a mass shooting someplace, but it was too nice of a day out here on the ocean for me to want to click the thumbnail and read about that...

Then I went to Mr. Rosado's MAIL, where there was nothing. No correspondence had ever been received or sent from this machine, at least not via the internet. I clicked COMPOSE, filled in my parent's email address, and wrote, 'Dear Mom and Dad…'

So much for the easy part. I stared at the blank space where my word were supposed to go, trying to think of what I could possibly say to my parents in a farewell e-mail. I gazed out the windows. That out there was my home now. Where I belonged. I could feel it calling to me...

But I think I'd always felt a profound connection to the sea---if nowhere near this strong---and that most humans feel it too. At the Delaware Bay Aquaritorium a spell would fall over the visitors as they rounded the hallway and saw that first big marine exhibit, an enthrallment that didn't depend on whatever kinds of creatures they could see or couldn't see beyond the glass. It was something about the place itself---that cool serene lighting---that soothed them and made them speak in hushed tones, like they were in church. If you trace our ancestry back far enough it's where we all came from, a world that is literally in our blood. The only real difference between mers and land people is that we went back...

But I wasn't here to window gaze. I had this thing to write. A farewell message that no matter what I said was not going to help them accept that they'd lost me forever.

I was glad the computer hadn't spoken in a while. The little cursor arrow blinking impatiently on and off was intimidating enough.

“What the heck can I tell them?” I wondered, and suddenly my first sentence started to form itself in my head.

“Hello Muddah... Hello Faddah... Here I am at... Camp Granada,” sang the computer in an annoying flat voice.

And there went my first sentence.

I was furious- “You stupid piece of crap! You're not funny! You're not entertaining! And I wasn't talking to you!!!”

“Ohhhh, talkin' to yourself, are ya? You know what dey say about dat,” the machine smirked, and let out an irritating singsong: “KOO-koo!! KOO-koo!!”

“Would you shut up?!!”

“Shut down? Sure thing, Toots!”

“No- STOP!” I shouted as PREPARING TO SHUT DOWN appeared on the screen.

“Had ya goin' there, didn't I?! Boyoboy, da look on yer kisser! Aaaarrr-har-har I got a million of 'em!!”
.

.
)))========> D.A.I.SY.
.

I managed to plow through all the interruptions, the terrible old songs and lame racist jokes, and eventually got the thing written and sent to my parent's e-mail addy. I'd been vague about the turning-into-a-mermaid part but at least they would know I was alive. The one piece of information that might make them feel a bit better. And I'd stuck in enough personal stuff (like "Give my love to Roofus", the neighbor's dog...) that even coming from this strange IP address they'd know it was really me and not somebody's sick prank.

I was about to check out what kind of video games they have in 2050 when Tom came in, “How are you doing?”

“I got it sent, but I'm not sure if I said what I really wanted to. I was kind of distracted.”

“Hey don't blame me, Sister! You was da one blabberin' at me and keepin' me from my beauty sleep-”

“Computer: Disengage voice-mode!” commanded Tom.

“Awwww, yer mudder wears army boots! Woob-oob-oob-oob-oob-oob-” shrieked the computer, falling silent in mid-woob.

“Why on Earth did you engage that thing?” puffed Tom.

“I didn't! Or I don't think I did.”

“I should have warned you, but I didn't think it would go on. So are you done here?”

“I guess so,” I said. I wished I'd fired off quick notes to my friends Pepper and Chiro too, but I was pretty sure my parents would pass along the news that they'd heard from me. I asked him, “So that computer voice, that wasn't an AI?”

“Not even close. It recognizes key words, and sentence structure, and has a couple million responses that it selects from. It's the personality gimmick that makes you think it's sentient. But who could have left it set to that one? I swear, WEISENHEIMER is the most annoying voice program there is; Even worse than that WASTED WALLY 420!”

“Wasted Wally?!"

“Fer sure, Braaaah!" he slurred in a moronic voice. "There's hundreds of them. Everything from VIRTUAL VOLTAIRE to SPORTSDUDE to that PENNY THE PINK PENGUIN Valerie loves; although I think she's getting a bit old for that one. And then there's a bunch strictly for men that are... that are...”

“Oooooh Baby!” I purred huskily, “Run your big strong fingers all over my hot trembling keyboard!”

Tom was staring into space. From the vacant look in his eyes I realized I'd just used my siren-voice, a mermaid skill I still knew nothing about except it was only to be used in life-or-death situations. Luckily he snapped out of it a second later, unaware that he'd been briefly turned into a compliant zombie.

"That's-" he laughed uncomfortably, “That's pretty much what they're like. They have that kind for all different, y'know, tastes. And there's a lot of programs marketed as 'AI', but so far the only real artificial intelligence is DAISY. Our team was well on our way to creating ZIPPY when those bastards shut us down!”

I asked, “So what kind of voice and personality did the Chinese give DAISY?”

“She chose her own. Not real flashy but friendly, cheerful, helpful. DAISY stands for DATA ACQUIRING INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM, which means her cognitive matrix doesn't wait for you to put things into it. She learns, acting all on her own, asking questions, reading and watching everything from the latest papers on mathematics to the cheesiest sitcoms. You ready for that sandwich now?”

“Starved,” I said as he grabbed my chair and started wheeling me out. “And with all that intelligence all she wants to do is be a television star?”

“She can do that and a million other things at the same time. Literally! She's come up with some pretty astonishing scientific breakthroughs in the three years she's been operating.”

“You're an inventor. Aren't you afraid she'll put you out of a job?”

He rocked my chair back and then forward, over the lip of the hatchway. “No. DAISY says human society can't handle more than one giant techological advancement per year, so she rations them out. But the three she's given us have been beauts. Although there's no pleasing some people. Like this Senator Greenspooner... I swear to Christ the man has to be dumber than bathtub scum! Because until now he'd always come down against just about any funding for scientific research, or teaching certain types of science in public schools...”

“Evolution?”

“Surprisingly not so much. Mostly different sciences that he accuses of 'denying the orderliness of Creation and promoting a nihilistic worldview'.... quantum physics, chaos theory, negative numbers; and for some reason he really doesn't like seahorses. I mean where the hell does he gets this stuff from?! But now he's yelling that DAISY is being high-handed and paternalistic for holding out on us with things she knows. It doesn't matter what she does or doesn't do, says or doesn't say. He'll find a way to make it part of her evil scheme. I mean here she revolutionizes agriculture with her 'air farming' system---which'll basically end famine within ten years---gives it to the whole world for free; and his reaction is that she's 'fattening us up for the slaughter'! What's she planning to do, eat us?!”

“IT'S A COOKBOOK!” I giggled, a reference to an old Twilight Zone episode that I didn't expect him to get.

"Exactly," he chuckled. “People still say that one in 2050. But DAISY really does have our best interest at heart. Like with how she- Oh Crap! I'm talking about the future again, aren't I? I get to talking AI and I forget everything else.”

“I forgot too, sorry! Remind me to remind you next time.”

The galley was alongside us again. Tom wheeled me into it, saying,“Did you really just want a peanut butter sandwich?”

“I guess not. It just seemed like something that would be easy to make.”

“Everything in here is easy to make,” he said, and with a conspiratorial grin, asked, “How about you and me split a big t-bone steak?”

“Oh hell yeah!”

“Great. And if we get caught I can blame it on you. We've just started on this Paleovegan diet. A big early breakfast, and then probably some kind of tofu crap just before dark,” he said, with a grimace that told me this diet was someone else's idea.

He pulled a plate with a snug fitting lid on it from the freezer, pried the lid off and slid it into the SmartRange, which looked more or less like a microwave oven. It was done in fifteen seconds, just enough time for him to push my chair up to the table and put down two cloth napkins and sets of silverware. I hadn't been reassured by the plate's resemblance to the ones hospital meals come on, but what was in it looked delicious.

“Wow. This is like a real home cooked meal.”

“It is. Phyllis and our cook Pierre made up a whole freezer's worth of different meals before we left,” Tom said. He bisected the baked potato and lifted half of it on a regular plate, then did this with the steak, leaving me the asparagus, the salad, some flan and the bigger piece of steak with the bone. When I popped a forkful of salad into my mouth I discovered it was nicely chilled while the steak in the adjoining dent still sizzled. Smart range!

We both fell into a frenzy of consumption. I kept looking over at that big cyclotron-looking appliance, trying to figure out what it was without having to ask about this piece of future technology. It had a digital timer display on it, the glowing red numerals clicking over from 2:32 to 2:31. Whatever it was doing it was doing it silently, and had two and a half hours to go.

"You must've really liked that!" said Tom, smiling in amusement. Which was when I realized I'd finished my whole plate and was chewing on the steak bone. There was a loud crack--which luckily wasn't one of the eye teeth I was bearing down on it with, and which gave me access to the delicious marrow inside---but I suddenly felt funny to be doing something so animal with him staring at me and regretfully set the bone down.

"Sorry," I grinned, “And I'm sorry about the way they shut your Big Brain Project down. I mean, I'm not asking anything about it, just saying I can imagine how that felt.”

“Thanks. And what I can say about the project is I really loved working there, and was furious about the way it ended. The pure stupidity of it! But that's when I decided to start working in the private sector, for myself, as far away from fools and bureaucrats as I could get, and I can tell you it's worked pretty well for me.”

“Got you rich?” I asked.

“Richer than I ever dreamed I'd be. And the money and toys are nice, but what's best is never have to worry about how I'm going to take care of my family, Jimmy and Valli's education. And I can't be too bitter about those two years at the Project; that's where I met the wonderful woman I share my life with, this family this I wouldn't even have if I hadn't worked there.”

I had to smile at that. “That's sweet.”

“And it was so unexpected. My wife Jeannie died when Jimmy was young, I'd been a single dad for almost ten years. Sort of muddling through, with no hopes that it might ever better than just okay. There was that big empty space in me, but I figured that's what being a widower was supposed to feel like. And Phyllis and Valerie; they were just starting to get their life together after her awful divorce from Psycho Tantrum Guy. So I was in physics, working on the quantum hardware for the memory core, and Phyllis was with the team developing ZIPPY's self-learning programs, and- But anyway, without getting technical, we were different departments. Different building even. But we kept running across each other; and-” his face lit up, “And speak of the Devil!”

Phyllis walked in and plucked the chunk of steak off his fork. Popped it into her mouth and rolled her eyes in pleasure.

“You're eating meat,” marveled Tom.

“You know what? The heck with it! I decided if I have to live through the Twenties again---and as an adult this time---I'm not only going to start eating meat, I might just become an alcoholic! At least until they snap out of that whole ugly paranoid rat-out-your-neighbors mentality, repeal the Gender Conformity Amendment and abolish the National Dress Code.”

“You'd better not,” Tom said, “I've seen you drunk. You'll wind up getting yourself arrested for wearing slacks in public, or punching the first bathroom cop who demands to see your Genetic ID to make sure you're carrying a pink card and not a blue card.”

“Bathroom cops?” I asked.

“TSA agents,” said Phyllis. “From the Toilet Safety Administration.”

Whatever they're talking about, it doesn't sound like the 2020's are going to be much fun, especially for transgender people. Maybe it's a good thing I'm a mermaid and will be missing all that. And if Tom is right, and I'll be a human and publishing a book about all this two years from now---he did say the author was a girl--- then hopefully I'll be transitioned and have my birth certificate changed by the time the ugly stuff starts. Unless they involuntarily de-transition everybody trying to live outside of their fascistic ideal of normalcy and their weirdness about bathrooms. And if I can't, at least I know it won't be forever, if by mid-century they're letting little Wendy grow up as the girl she is...

Tom said, “But it's probably better if you don't turn into a drunk. Become a shopping addict instead.”

“That does sound a lot more fun,” she said, snagging the last little chunk of steak off his plate. “But if I do I plan to go totally nuts with it. Can we afford that?”

“I have a few lucrative patents up my sleeve. But don't worry, you won't have to throw yourself into some addiction. We're getting back to 2050 if I have to invent a time machine.”

“My hero!” she said, and gave him a big steaky-mouthed kiss, then turned to me, “So did you get that e-mail sent to your parents?”

“I did! And it's a real load off my mind!”

What I didn't know then was my e-mail had gone right to my parents' spam folder, where they didn't recognize it as a message from me, and didn't even read it until I got home, retrieved it from the Recycle Bin and showed it to them...
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)))========> DYSMORPHIA MY ASS!
.

I felt like some kind of weird mermaid parade float as both of them got behind me and pushed me up the inclined hallway and onto the deck.

Valerie was standing at the railing, snapping pictures with a camera that looked like a Frisbee with a pair of crescent shaped handle-things cut from it on either side of the dark glossy disk of its lens.

“What are you doing, Honey?” asked Phyllis.

“This thing doesn't fly anymore since I crashed it, but the camera part still works. I'm getting pictures of our trip to 2014.”

“That's the ocean. It looks the same as it does in our time,” said Tom.

“Not really, not if you really look at it. And I want to get some of us in the Oldie Days too,” she said, and snapped his picture.

He said, “We might as well. We have time.”

There was a half a mermaid lying on Valli's chaise lounge. I pointed at it, “What happened to your friend here?”

“That's my other tail. The non-mech one. I want Mom or Dad to take some pictures of us being mermaids together.”

“What a cute idea!” exclaimed Phyllis.

I said, “I'm sorry Valerie, but no! It's out of the question. I'll take pictures of you guys all together but I can't be in any of them. I've broke too many rules, crossed too many lines today already!”

“Oh that's right,” said Phyllis, “Sorry Sweetheart, that would be too big of a risk for her people.”

“You mean like if we had a picture of a real mermaid someone bad might see it and go out looking for them?”

“That's the idea.” I said.

A crafty smile spread across her face. She went over to the mangled mechanical tail that was lying on the deck and squatted down next to it. Pulled several plastic gemstones from it and began peeling its rubber skin off of the frame. “But could you be in my pictures if you were a fake mermaid?”

“You want me to wear that over my real tail? But then you wouldn't have a photo of a real mermaid.”

She carried it over and handed it to me, “Sure I would, but only me, Mom and Dad would know you weren't fake. And Wendy. I don't need it to be all real looking, I just want a picture of my friend.”

How could I say no to that?

“Fine. Let's see if it fits,” I said as held it by the waist-hole and unfurled it. “Oh God! It look like a- uh, never mind.”

Tom and Phyllis started laughing. I guess it looked like a giant's condom to them too, that shredded caudal fin sticking out from its end like a fishy French tickler (which conjured up a mental image of my mermaid mom and Jacques Cousteau doing stuff that I really would've preferred not to imagine).

From tip to tip, the end of my tailfin was the widest part of me. I had to sort of bend it and stuff it into the fake tail's opening like a foot going into a snug boot, then pull the rubber sheath up over me like a pair of pants.

Very tight pants...

I shimmied and squirmed and was able to get it pulled most of the way up my fish half. And it did seem like it would be long enough, but when it got to my hips I had to pull and pull.

I really didn't appreciate having an audience for this, the Rosados watching my progress with interest as I grunted and writhed, the rubbery material squeaking loudly in protest. I had got the thing pulled almost up to my waist when the tear that Nee-shay the Shark had made in it began to spread and grow, ripping clear up to the top of it!

“MOTHERF-” I caught myself, “GAAAAHHHH!!!!!”

“Don't worry, that tail was gonno anyway. And it fits you now,” said Valerie.

“Maybe you can turn sideways so the ripped part doesn't show,” said Phyllis. She was trying to be helpful, but I almost snapped her head off.

I couldn't believe this tail didn't fit me! I looked over at its cage-like frame. The top end of the thing was HUGE! Like the steel framework for a zeppelin. And yet the fabric skin had fit over that just fine. But not over me...

It was a horrible discovery, but the facts were undeniable: I had a big butt!

Where had this big jiggling scaly green lard ass come from all of a sudden? I wasn't any fatter than my sister, was I? I conjured up a mental image of her, because surely she didn't have a- Oh wait, yes she did.

Why hadn't I noticed it before? Anemone and Enomena, the Bubble Butt Twins...

And come to think of it, our mom had an even bigger butt. Oh boy, that was sure something to look forward to. No wonder the doorways in the castle were so big!

And that portrait of Grandma Meredith in the Castle's grand hall? Large as a barge...

The statue of the Mermaid First Mother out in the courtyard? If it wasn't underwater that ass could have served as a perch for a whole flock of pigeons!

It was obvious to me now, that this was our family curse, as across my mind's eye there paraded a succession of thunderously big butts; a whole long line of them, stretching all the way back to Atlantis...

Which would still be a continent today if it hadn't been sunk by the weight of all those blubbery big fat booties!

“Oh God,” I groaned, “My ass is HUGE!”

Phyllis laughed.

“Oh that's it, laugh at the freak with the plus-size whale butt!”

She laughed again. “Plus size?! I only wish I had a figure like yours. I mean with legs and minus the scales...”

I pointed at the big rip in the rubbery stuff covering me, “But this tail, it-”

She gave me a reassuring smile. “-is made for a little girl without any hips. Compared to her you're a grown woman. And you're not fat. Not by any stretch of the imagination.”

“You think so?” I asked. Suddenly the metal frame of Valerie's tail sitting over there didn't seem nearly so Hindenburg-like now.

“What I think is you're fifteen years old, and you're looking at yourself hypercritically. Teenage girls can psych themselves into all kinds of destructive body image disorders. Anorexia, body dysmorphia...”

“My shrink gave me a bunch of tests that came out saying I don't have anything like that. Well except for thinking my nose looked weird when nobody else thought so, and for hating my... Well you know, how I felt about being a boy. That was a huge thing for me. But I don't even have those anymore.”

“Exactly. You're a girl now, and now comes all the fun stuff. Instead of that one big problem you get all the usual worries us women have about how we look, about being fat, looking old; constantly comparing ourselves to other women around us and those underfed little things in the fashion magazines.”

“Maybe you're right,” I said. I didn't want to become one of these eating-disorder girls who have an insane funhouse-mirror image of their body and thinks about it constantly. There's no real happiness in that. I supposed I could live with my somewhat rotund fishbutt.
.

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)))================> CHEESE
.

I watched as Valerie jumped into her chaise lounge and slid her legs into her other mermaid tail. Covered in blue green scales with deep indigo edges it was really pretty, and surprisingly realistic. At snapshot distance no one would really be able to tell a flesh-and-blood tail from a clever fake.

And hadn't Valerie assumed I was some kind of pretend mermaid when we first met, right up until I proved to her that I wasn't? I began peeling off the pink harlequin tail.

“What are you doing?” asked Valli.

“Throwing caution to the wind,” I said, and tossed the thing out of camera range. I reached down between our loungers, grabbed my tartan bandage and tied it back around my tail wound with a nice big bow. I flopped my fin over onto her chair, alongside of hers, “See? Now we match a lot better.”

“Holy!”

“And anyone who looks at your pictures of us will think we're just a couple of human girls in costumes.”

“Wait,” said Phyllis. She took off her big polka dot sunglasses and slid them onto my face, whispering, “For your eyes.”

“Thanks,” I said; at first thinking it was because they probably weren't very pretty looking right now, but then remembering that my larger-than-human eyeballs would have outed me as either a mermaid or some kind of weird space-alien chick.

At Valerie's request Tom pushed our loungers together so we could pose with our arms around each other, making silly faces and sneaking a hand up behind the other one's head to do the peace-sign devil horns thing.

Then Phyllis crouched behind us and Tom got a few of her with the two mer-girls, and she snapped a couple of Tom crouching behind us. Then Valerie insisted that her dad go get his sturdy saltwater rod and his boonie hat so she could take one of him with me in his arms, looking like the fisherman who had just caught a mermaid.

I can understand how merpeople would consider this gag to be in really bad taste. The idea that humans murder and exploit our kind is deeply ingrained in our culture and folklore (even though proven accounts of bad encounters with land dwellers only seem to occur about twice in a century...) and a picture like this could be seen as making light of these tragedies. But Valli really wanted this, because they already had a picture hanging back there in the hallway where he'd posed with her like this, and she wanted this one to go up in a frame next to it.

And since I'd already broken about every rule in the kelpbook I figured I might as well make my sinning complete...

“Sorry I'm kind of heavy, I've got this butt,” I apologized as he picked me up, the fishing pole standing upright and held in the crook of his elbow.

“Nawww! You're light a minnow,” he assured me, bouncing me a bit in his arms.

I wanted to avoid any sexual overtones in a picture of me and Mr. Rosado in such a close embrace, so as we said “Cheese!” I cocked my head sideways and made my smile as big and goofy as I could. And when I saw the picture on the camera's screen a few minutes later Tom was doing the same. With these big silly glasses and my shiny gold “wig” I looked like some last-minute-Halloween-costume Lady Gaga, and we both looked like a couple of real dorks. I wish I had a copy of that picture, and a couple of the cuter ones of me and Valli.
.

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)))==> NEVER BUY YOUR DEATH STARS FROM A COMPANY NAMED ACME
.

“How are we doing on time?” asked Phyllis.

“We should leave in about two hours.”

“That's enough time for a movie...”

“Sure,” grinned Tom, “But something historical. Nothing set in a time after two-thousand fourteen.”

"Or anything made in the next few years shouldn't be too bad," suggested Phyllis, until her husband whispered something in her ear and she made a lemon-sucking face. "Oh! Right... Nothing after 2016..."

"Why? What's gonna happen?" I asked, my big all-day smile wavering suddenly.

"Let's just say it's nobody you'll ever see carved into Mount Rushmore," quipped Phyllis, then she pointedly changed the subject with a hearty: "So... What sort of movie are you kids in the mood for?"

“The Deeptown Fisheroo Review Movie!”

“NOOOOOOOO!!!” screamed Tom and Phyllis together.

I asked, “Do you have anything set 'A long time ago in a galaxy far away'?”

“I have all six trilogies. Although the three most recent films aren't movies as you know them. And the format itself would be a future-spoiler.”

“Anything's fine. Just pick a good one.”

And that's how I saw Episode VII of the Star Wars movies---sprawled on a couch in their home theater with my own bowl of popcorn---before the filming itself was even completed. I think my friend Chiro was more impressed by that when I told him about it than by my actual travels in space. And as I watched I thought: "Considering this is probably the last movie I'll ever get to see, this isn't too bad..." It was fun, way better than any of the films from the Darth-Vader-grows-up trilogy, and I loved that little soccer-ball-in-a-hat robot (though not as much as Little Miss Squirrelly did!).

About halfway through the movie there was a loud beeping from down in the kitchen and Phyllis ("But Mommmm! You're gonna miss the best part!") excused herself, and ten minutes later came back with a big steaming plate of something that smelled like pure heaven, and a smaller plate just for me. Little toothpick-speared cubes of smoked albacore, piping hot, right from the cyclotron- which it turns out was nothing more futuristic than a high-tech odorless smoker. I had to fight to keep from groaning, that fish was so good!
.

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)))========> THE QUANTUM PAPERWEIGHT
.

And then it was time for them to leave. It had been wonderful reconnecting for a few hours with the human world I'd left behind, and I was sad to see my new friends go. I really liked these Rosados. Valerie was just a total sweetheart, and more than any of my friend's parents did Phyllis and Tom reminded me of my own science-geek mom and dad.

I put on my belt, and Anemone's backpack with all our clothes and stuff in it, plus a big ziplock bag holding about a kilo of their smoked albacore, which Phyllis had decided to give me after hearing me rave about it. She was totally over her mer-phobia or whatever and didn't flinch at all as I hugged and thanked her, but hugged me right back.

Then Tom picked me up and carried me over to the side of the boat, “How do you want to do this? Do I throw you in?”

“Just set me down on the railing,” I said, and he did. The rail was flat, and wide enough to balance on.

“Thanks for the blade,” I told him, patting the scabbard on my hip with the dive knife they'd given me in it. Although I still hoped I'd be able to find the one I lost down there on the seafloor. I was really dreading having to tell Mom that I'd lost King Uyehtah's gold knife.

“It was the least I could do,” he shrugged, then unfastened the strap his big fancy waterproof wristwatch and tried to hand it to me, "And here, take this too. I could see the way you kept looking at it."

"Was I? I guess I was, they're kind of a high prestige item down below, but I don't want to take your watch. It won't be good for much after the batteries run down."

He chuckled. "It's got a thirty-year power cell. The battery will probably last longer than the watch will. And this is my cheapie, I have a much nicer one, that's good for down to a thousand meters, which is deeper than I'll ever go."

"Me too, I hope! Are you sure about this?" I asked as he pushed it at me again, and I probably wouldn't have taken it for myself, but then I thought of something. "Would you mind if I gave this to my mother? Or would re-gifting this be a classless thing to do?"

"No, that'd be great! It's not every day I can give a gift to the Queen of the Mermaids!"

"Except I'm going to have to lie to her, tell her I found it on the sea floor. She's exiled citizens for less than what I've done here today!"

Phyllis exclaimed in horror- "But she wouldn't! She's your MOTHER!"

"My mother... who told me and my sister not to expect leniency from the Magistrate or a pardon from her if we ever commit a crime; And that our sentences might actually be stiffer, to show the people no one is exempt from the law..."

"Then tell her whatever you have to. The only thing I'm gonna ask is that you don't patent any of the components," Tom said, and placed the watch in my hand. It was a man's watch, kind of big and clunky, but Mom wouldn't know the difference.

"I sure won't. Thank you so much," I said as I secured it around my own wrist, then leaned out to hug him again.

“Thank you for the ribbon!” said Valerie, waving my tartan bandage like it was a real prize. She'd said she wanted it to remember me by, and since we had a whole big roll of it back in the infirmary I said sure.

“You'll probably want to wash that though; or you might catch my mermaid germs and turn into a mermaid.”

“Don't tell her that,” laughed Phyllis, “She'll put it in her mouth!”

“Well, goodbye,” I said, and gave them each a hug. Valerie hugged me last, and had to be removed from me by her parents. For her sake I decided not to drag this out. I waved bye-bye and backflipped into the water.

I surfaced to see them all crowded at the rail. I called up to Tom, “There's one's thing I have to ask. What did you invent, anyway? I mean in vague general terms, if you can...”

“The quantum paperweight. I was just looking for a way to hold down papers on my patio table... Who would have thought it had so many other applications?"

"I guess it would," I laughed, "And any other genius ideas in the works?"

He grinned with pride. "There's one: The hyperdimensional wastebasket. A way to put five hundred gallons of trash in a five gallon bucket. I got tired of taking out the trash all the time."

"You really think you could build something like that?"

"I already have. I just need to work on a more efficient pocket universe generator. As it is the thing eats up a few hundred dollars worth of electricity a month. And if it shuts down- hoo-boy what a mess!"

"I'm sure you'll figure it out," I said, and raised my hand, "Well, goodbye!"

“Bye Enomena!”

“Watch out for sharks!”

Valerie just gave a sad little wave. She was crying.

“I love you, Sweetie,” I called out to her, and raised a clenched fist, “Mermaids Forever!”

Tom shouted down, “I have one last gift for you, the time-line be damned. If you do manage to get back to your human life, save up your money and buy shares of Nanodyne stocks when they hit the exchange in 2024. In ten years a 2 dollar share will be worth hundreds, and they'll keep rising slowly but surely after that.”

“Thank you! I'll remember that."

Phyllis whispered something to him that sounded like 'the kaiju...' and he said, “Oh yeah! And whatever you do, stay out of Toyko in the spring of 2030, unless you want to get stomped on!”

“I'll try to. If you can't find your way back to your year come back and see me, we'll figure out something,” I said.

"Will do," said Tom, and he and Phyllis disappeared from the gunwhale railing.

The anchor went up, the engines roared to life and and the Eureka took off, rising up on its hydrofoils when it got going fast enough. Valerie kept waving from the stern. In a few minutes they were just a dot on the horizon.
.

I don't know if the Rosados got back to 2050 or not. But even if they didn't, I had a feeling they would do just fine.
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&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
AUTHOR'S NOTE Friday May 13, 2016:
I'm afraid that's going to be it for a while. There's a chapter, possibly two that only exist in the form of six pages of handwritten notes, before we get back to a bunch of chapters that are all finished and which I'll be able to posted on a weekly basis.

But rest assured that my team of 1000 amphetamine-fueled monkeys pounding typewriter keys at random will be working around the clock to produce this chapter or two about Enomena's whirlwind romance with her “tall dark stranger” (a merman prince from a kingdom the Indian Ocean)- which will hopefully be posted by the end of June.
Love you madly, Laika
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THaNK You FoR ReaDiNG! PLeaSe CoMMeNT...
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NEXT: THE BABY-SITTER'S CLUB GOES UPSIDE MY HEAD