Pod People
Back when Danny was alive still, he was always giving me ocean facts, always real solemnly. Like: Dad, there’s a wrinkly gray shark in the Arctic Ocean that trades its eyes for parasites, did you know? Dad, there’s a tropical fish that uses a worm for a tongue.
I guess lately I’ve been thinking about all those watery symbioses, because lately it feels like I’m one of them. What with piloting the dolphin.
It’s not exactly a real dolphin. They grew it in an embryo tank, and instead of the massive mushroom-shaped dolphin brain it’s only got a little nub of brainstem plugged into a carbon shell all full of circuitry and conductor gel. That’s where the pilot goes: dropped right into the body via the wireless shunt.
So, even though I’m inside a research base, swimming in a counter-current pool with an oxygen mask strapped to my face, I’m also a hundred kilometers up the coastline racing Vino through the waves. And it might be research, but it’s also sheer and giddy joy.
I’m a strong swimmer. That’s the reason they picked me to pilot. That and because I’ve got high concentrations of a certain neurotransmitter, I guess. I know the feel of a perfect stroke, when your whole body is working with the water, not against it, from your cupped hand biting the surface to your flexed feet knifing through it.
Being a dolphin is that, factor ten. Vino rockets down into the dark blue and I rocket after her, cutting through a freezing cold ocean that feels the perfect temperature to my new nerves, my new blubber-sheathed body. I’ve piloted drones before, flown surveillance for a corp, but this feels more like flying than that ever did.
We point our snouts for the sandy bottom, a distant brown murk, scrape our bellies on it, and send sand swirling everywhere. Then up, up fast, tails threshing us toward the gauzy sunlight. Vino hurtles clear of the water and I do the same trick, using all my borrowed muscles at once.
There’s this beautiful never-ending moment of suspension, up in the sky, shedding the sea off my fins and flukes, perfectly weightless in a cloud of soft shattered glass.
Then I smash back under the surface, where Vino’s already waiting. They gave her the nickname because she’s aged so well, going on forty-three but somehow still quickest in this little pod of eight that’s been hunting together these past weeks.
She’s the brainiest, too, which is why they want me with her. She gave me this real long inspection when the team first dropped me in, maybe because I was still moving a little funny back then, still adjusting to the nerve feedback. But after a couple days she gave me the okay, and now we’re almost friends. Not that I’d put it that way to the team.
It’s true, though: I know her favorite kind of squid, I know how she likes to go upside down and blow air rings at the younger ones to tease them, I can even tell her chirps from the others. And she’s the one who got me in with the rest of the pod, so we all owe her that much.
Vino gives a sharp whistle and curls herself around, angling back the way we came.
I make my thought slow and simple, feeding it into the AI that’ll turn it into words on the research facility smart screens a hundred kilometers away: She’s heading back to the cove. Follow?
Follow, the team buzzes in my cortex. We’ll pull you out in an hour. Storm coming in.
I can feel it in the water, a static charge in the quicksilver currents. Okay. Sounds good.
* * *
Danny’s the reason I volunteered for this job, I guess. He loved the ocean from the day he first saw it: his beautiful black eyes went all big and he peed himself. But, of course, he was barely a year old then, and peed himself often. When he got older, I remember him always skipping along the surf, looking for hermit crabs, or running up to show me a slimy ball of seaweed.
Me, I wasn’t raised with ocean. But I spent half my childhood in a big square pool with a cement diving platform and a rust-flaking ladder. It got drained and filled back up on Sundays, maybe every other week. The deep end filled first, which meant the shallow end was our beach for a while, a slice of warm blue tile baking in the sun.
The pool had its own little ecosystems, too. I remember the water-skimmers tiptoeing over the surface—or maybe below the surface, and what you see is their reflection; someone told me that once. I remember the bats swooping down over the pool at dusk to drink.
I used to daydream about taking Danny and his mum there someday, but it’s a continent away and probably closed down before Danny was even born. And Danny got to grow up with a real beach, which I think is much better.
He didn’t get swept off in a riptide, if that’s what you’re wondering. He was on his little green bicycle, and a lorry backed over him. Me and his mum split up after that, which makes sense, because we each had only half a heart left to run on.
Anyways. Back to the ocean.
* * *
The pod’s not where we left them. They’re congregated at the far edge of the cove, circling around something, chittering to each other. I can’t see what it is—dolphin eyes aren’t so sharp—and I’m still getting the hang of using the echolocation. One of the young bulls surfaces long enough for a breath before he comes back down.
As me and Vino get closer, the water reverberates with conversation. Our AI is still learning to interpret all the clicks and squeals, but I get the gist of it. Angry, agitated. Scared.
A hundred kilometers away, I feel a churning in my stomach, a phantom dread. In the dolphin body, I feel a keening chemical discomfort. Vino cuts through the circle, and I follow in her wake. Billie, one of the recent mothers, is nosing at a tangle of trash, making the same soft whistle over and over again.
No, not trash. I recognize the mesh of a crab pot, and I recognize the shape of Billie’s calf caught halfway inside it. He’s been a rascal almost since he was born. Swims off too far to play, makes his mum come chasing after him—how she’s doing now. But this time is different.
He’s already drowned.
The keening intensifies. I drift closer, even though I don’t want to. Billie’s calf is dead. He snapped one of his little fins trying to wriggle free; it juts off his body at a bad angle. I’ve never seen crab pots in this cove before, never once. Judging from the glint, it’s freshly fabbed.
Vino noses the calf with her muzzle, giving him little kisses. The pod keeps circling, checking in, darting out again. I know I’m supposed to observe, because this is a whole data mine when it comes to dolphin social structure and death response, but I can barely stand to watch.
I try to make my thought slow and simple: Billie’s calf got caught in a crab trap. Drowned. Must have been an autotrawler passing through.
They’ll send an underwater drone with precision shears to free the body, and I should stick around, probably, to keep Billie out of the way. Once it’s free they’ll let her have it. I know dolphins have trouble letting go. I’ve seen netclips of a mother towing her calf’s corpse up to the surface to not-breathe, nudging it along beside her until it starts to rot.
I look at Billie’s calf again. He’s still semi-buoyant, but soon he’ll either sink or rise up to the surface all on his own—I think it depends on the gases, how they spread through the body cavity during decomposition.
The reply buzzes in: Shit, Walmsley. There was nothing on the scopes. Might have a scrambler.
So there’s a big grimy robot drifting along the seafloor dropping death traps, I think. And it’s invisible to the radar array.
There’s a delay, and I figure it was too complex a sentence, but then the reply comes: We’ll have to deal with that and the calf tomorrow. Time to rendezvous at the boat.
I know they’re right. There’s inclement weather incoming. The dolphin body’s skull is full of expensive gear, and that gear needs to go back to the research base. But I can’t leave Billie’s calf tethered like that, so I nose as close as I can, gently nudging Billie’s rubbery face out of the way, and try chewing through the mesh.
All it gets me is a mouthful of blood and reproachful chirping from Billie and Vino. Dolphin teeth are for trapping fish, not gnawing through crab pots. The helplessness is a familiar feeling, and I really, really hate it.
Okay, I think. Heading in.
* * *
Vino is reluctant about it, but she leaves Billie and the calf so she can follow me to the boat. She’s done this for the past week. Seems fascinated by it, watching the hydraulic arm scoop me out of the water and put me in the tank, at which point I can disconnect safely and go back to inhabiting my regular body.
Today I feel sick and guilty about the fact I’m leaving. The fact I couldn’t work Billie’s dead calf free from the mesh. The fact I’m not really one of the pod, and Vino knows it, even if she doesn’t quite understand why. I put on a burst of speed, trying to lose her. I don’t want her watching me go up in the boat today.
The storm’s building above us; with my low-color dolphin eyes I see a flash that must be lightning. I race toward the boat and Vino chases, but it doesn’t feel good how it should, doesn’t feel anything like before. It feels like I’m back to running away from things.
Vino’s too fast. When I reach the rocking shape of the boat’s hull, she’s right alongside me.
Here, I think, then, to Vino, even though she can’t hear me: Sorry.
The arm flexes down into the water, but when I swim for it, Vino blocks me. Her rubbery body slides against mine and she nips at my fin. At first I think she’s playing. Then I think she’s trying to stop me from leaving, worried I won’t be back this time. Then I recognize the scattershot squeal of her echolocation, and realize she’s spotted something.
I turn my snout the same way and try to use a sense I don’t have in my other body; what comes back is a jumble of silvery lines. One sticks out, hard and angular.
Do you see the autotrawler? I think to the team. Just to the east of us.
Nothing, they reply. You got a visual, Walmsley?
Thunder rumbles overhead, muffled through the water.
Yeah. Think so.
Vino gives an agitated whistle, then takes off, a torpedo heading straight for the autotrawler’s silhouette. I feel my gut lurch a hundred kilometers away. If the autotrawler’s unlicensed, if it’s got a scrambler, it might have other things, too. Electric prods to keep scavengers away from its catches. Maybe a harpoon gun.
Vino’s gone after it, I think. I don’t want her to hurt herself.
I swoop away from the boat arm and take off after her.
* * *
It’s storming in earnest now, dark choppy waves slashing across the surface, sucking us up towards them. The rain pelts my skin when I breach. My blowhole burns like lungs on a winter run.
The team is buzzing in my head, but the connection’s gone choppy as the water. I don’t have much time. Either they’re going to pull me out, or the storm will.
Vino keeps barreling on, fast as I’ve ever seen her move, and the autotrawler is just ahead. It’s a bulbous mustard-yellow thing, limbs tucked up inside its metal underbelly. For a moment I see it how the pod must see it: a mechanical monster always wailing to itself in the same sonar pitch, laying mesh eggs the perfect size to drown a calf.
Vino strikes the side of it like a torpedo. The impact jars her whole body. The autotrawler barely shivers. She dives deep and comes at it again, this time trying for the underside. I chitter nonsense at her, trying to stop her; her rubbery head collides with the metal and snags a sharp edge.
I’m beside her now, and I taste the little cloud of her blood. I try to block her how she blocked me at the boat, but she’s quicker and nimbler. She whips around me and tries again, smashing her snout into the autotrawler’s side. The machine keeps moving, implacable, sucking and expelling seawater through its gaping intake.
I know how it feels to hate a machine. The autotrawler’s following programming, the same way the lorry that hit Danny was following programming until its collision AI glitched. Vino keeps hurling herself against the metal. The autotrawler’s not shocking her, or spearing her, but it’s barely noticing her and that’s almost worse.
Get back to the boat, the team finally cuts through. Can you hear us? Walmsley?
I think up all kinds of excuses to stay. This is valuable data I’m recording for them, after all. This is a dolphin displaying grief and displacing frustration. But that’s not the real reason I can’t leave. Vino is me, and Billie’s calf might as well be Danny, his broken leg sticking out at a bad angle. And whoever programmed this autotrawler has no idea.
Vino dekes past me again and slams herself into the machine’s metal plating.
It’s got a scrambler, I think to them. Gets away, the conservation authorities might never find it.
They don’t hear me. Walmsley? We’re trying to pull you out. Storm’s messing with the link.
The cut on Vino’s head is bleeding worse now, leeching red into the cold water. She’s going to smash her head in trying to make it pay attention, and I can’t stop her. But I can do something else if I do it fast enough. If I don’t lose my nerve.
I nudge Vino aside, then target the autotrawler’s intake. It’ll be a tight fit. The team has a back-up body, but they won’t be happy about this. I’ll lose the pilot job for sure, which means no more wave-racing with Vino. No more diving through shoals of glimmery fish. No more feeling weightless.
And it’s going to really, really hurt.
I chirp a goodbye to Vino, flip myself around like an acrobat, and wedge myself into the intake tail-first, to make sure the expensive hardware in the skull survives. The pain chews through my dolphin nerves and I feel myself twitching and spasming a hundred kilometers away.
Through the pain, I feel the autotrawler shudder, halt. I hear the team buzzing in my head, trying to make sense of my vitals. The disconnect will be any second now. I hear Vino squeaking. I’ll miss her and the pod and the factor-ten swimming.
But there’s a wrinkly gray shark in the Arctic Ocean that trades its eyes for parasites that glow bright enough to attract food. There’s a tropical fish that trades its tongue for a worm. I’m just doing a trade of my own.
The ocean’s not mine anyways. Maybe once I get a new job, I can find a blue-tiled pool somewhere. Go swimming. I think that’d be real—
Rich Larson was born in Niger, has lived in Spain and the Czech Republic, and is currently based in Canada. He is the author of the novels Annex and Ymir, as well as collections Tomorrow Factory and The Sky Didn’t Load Today and Other Glitches. His fiction has been translated into over a dozen languages, among them Polish, French, Romanian and Japanese, and adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS.
Copyright © 2025 Rich Larson.