Myopia

In this story, titled ‘Myopia’, complete remote sensing coverage, advanced modeling tools and sensors tagged onto almost everything that moves through the water, have turned the oceans completely transparent. While the protagonist of this story can see the ocean in all its depth and vastness through a sensing device implanted in his body, he hasn’t physically been close to the ocean in years. This changes when a colleague asks him to help her hunt down an illegal fishing crew, which creates blind spots in the monitoring system to fly under the radar. When he finally reaches the vessel and confronts the crew, he realizes that things are not as clear cut in the real world compared to his data streams. While his perspective might be heavily mediated by technology, he has to make the most important choice of his career by following his intuition. 

He ends this day as he ended the last day and the day before that, sitting on his couch watching a family friendly and lighthearted TV show, something to calm his busy mind. Tonight, a re-run of a science-cooking show is on, the contestants are tasked with cooking a surprising meal out of non-red listed, noninvasive, fast reproducing and thus fast recovering fish, while explaining their function in the ecosystem.  He imagines himself trying to cook one of the meals from the episode, but realistically, he will order takeout. “How did I get here?” he sighs. His eyes fixate on the banner of the century of ocean science, a multitude of satellites orbiting a stylized tuna, which is still placed over his TV.

The stupid fish seems to be mocking the loss of his lifelong contract with the university, due to a tiny mistake that wasn’t even really his fault. Like every other scientist, he was supposed to spend his entire career on one project, to align his work with the timescales of ecological processes. A faint melodic sound interrupts his thoughts, he tends to forget to turn off his Aletheia – a device to receive, process and visualize big data, which he recently got implanted for maximum efficiency and comfort. The fading scar on his left-hand tingles, as exabytes of satellite images and their accompanying metadata run through his nervous system to reach his brain.

He has always been closely connected to his tech equipment, taking it everywhere he could. Almost every waking hour was spent following the movement of the ocean current models or the ships and schools of fish represented by tiny moving dots on a map. The only thing slowing down his work was the time he needed to type stuff with his clumsy fingers or switch between open tabs, so it was the next logical step to cut out the middleman and just implant the device. And it was marvelous, it felt like he was seeing the whole ocean in all its depth and complexity through data streams and models. He is startled by another ringtone; it takes him a second to realize it is his phone this time. He answers the call and is overjoyed to hear the voice of his colleague and mentor. “Muizenberg, we need your help.”

The words are like music to his ears. He is so excited; he barely listens to the rest of the call. “Someone is using opaque data to evade our monitoring systems; we need to find out where this is coming from, before any damage can be done. This might be your chance to fix your reputation, come into the office as fast as you can.” He is on the road in no time, dreaming to resume his place in the community.  He might even have a chance to pitch his newest idea to his colleagues: a hydropower station that predicts where eddies form to follow them, using the power of calculations to harness clean energy. He flies up the stairs to his colleague’s office and enters to a familiar sight: the whole room is filled with a hologram of a particular point of the High Seas, swarms of fish, plants and even the currents are visualized by dancing rays of blue electricity, bringing the ocean directly into the office.

Dr. Mbatha looks up from the screen she is studying. She doesn’t waste time exchanging pleasantries, but a warm smile indicates that she is happy to see him, which she would never admit, of course. “There you are, finally. You understand why this is of highest importance, right? These criminals had the audacity to hack into some of our satellites, effectively creating a blind spot in our transparent ocean. This is incredibly embarrassing for our institution; the government and the public are expecting us to keep track of all activities in the Southern Ocean and these people somehow manage to literally fly under our radar. Not to forget the environmental consequences, I’m sure whoever is behind this wants to make a profit from illegal fishing, either by scoping out changed migration routes or changes in fish morphology.

Species are adapting and evolving so fast these days, if a subspecies differentiates enough from the original, our cameras won’t recognize it anymore and we lose track of them. The species will be fished to extinction before we know it existed. It is our duty to ensure that all ocean data is collected, analyzed and shared in a transparent manner. You of all people know what happens if data is placed in the wrong hands.” He stares at the ground, embarrassed that she is bringing up his past again. It never occurred to him to ask why they needed him, the employee best known for being chaotic and unreliable, for this mission. Dr. Mbatha continues “to be honest, I am out of my depths here. I thought we had finally won this fight; how can illegal fishers possibly compete with almost complete remote sensing coverage and skyrocketing citizen science? Millions of updates are shared online every day, laypeople are publishing geo-tagged pictures, analyzed plant and water samples, animal sightings. It just seems impossible to me that no one has any knowledge on these last remaining illegal activities.” 

She looks incredibly frustrated, but not yet defeated, as she lets him in on the plan. “We want you to pose as a high ranking “client” for opaque data, so that we can bait the criminals into meeting us. I know it sounds ridiculously outdated to meet them in person, but they might trust you, since you’re not affiliated with an institution anymore. And we might be able to trust you again, if this goes as planned.” The thought of a second chance is so tempting, he would do anything to be part of the team again. Also, he dislikes opaque data as much as the next scientist, so being able to put an end to these murky businesses would give him considerable personal satisfaction too. Therefore, he agrees to meet Dr. Mbatha and her team in the harbor tomorrow and heads out into the night. To clear his head, he decides to walk home, looking at the night sky, the vast darkness disrupted by a seemingly infinite number of gleaming satellites racing through the sky like steampunk stars. 

The next day, brimming with excitement, he is sitting on deck of a high-speed HoverBoat, going over the details of the plan Dr. Mbatha had explained to him earlier. He is fascinated by his surroundings; he hasn’t seen the open ocean with his own eyes in years. The smell of salt and algae, the wind on his face and the sounds of seabirds are complementing the data on sea-surface temperature, algal blooms, recent pollution events and the speed and direction of the currents that his Aletheia is showing him. Maps and models visualize behind his eyes, using these datasets to calculate the presence of fish, which genus they belong to and where they might be going. A swarm of drones, fully equipped with high resolution cameras fly over his head and as he leans a bit over the guardrail, he can see the floating buoys and underwater gliders, collecting the data he and other scientists will receive soon. As he approaches the intended meeting place, he turns off his Aletheia as well as the GPS device on his boat, to signal to the criminals that he is one of them. In doing so, he immediately feels more vulnerable, as if some essential part of his body was missing. A vessel appears on the horizon, he stiffens and mentally prepares for the meeting. 

His palms are sweating as he enters their vessel. It looks like it has been in use for decades, rusty and haphazardly self-repaired in many places. There is already a net dragging behind it now, leaving no doubt that they are using the blind spot to fish illegally, but the catch they could make using the satellite data they’re collecting will be worth a lot more. He walks up to the crew and can’t help but notice the tiredness on their faces, the worn-out clothes that look like they might have slept in them. For some reason, this situation makes him acutely aware of his privileged position, the enormous amounts of power and influence he wields as a scientist.  He’s too nervous to stick to his script and starts to make awkward small talk instead, a grave mistake since the criminals don’t feel like a dot on the map any longer, but are slowly becoming three-dimensional beings, who might even have a reason for their illegal behavior. He was taught that remote sensing revealed the objective truth, enabling all-encompassing transparency and radical honesty but he can’t shake the feeling that his colleagues and supervisors have missed something crucial by converting a place as mystical and lively as the ocean into strings of data.

He knows that right now, Dr. Mbatha is pacing around her office, her eyes glued to the hologram, waiting for him to fulfill his part of the mission. He remembers laughing at her plan earlier, he still can’t believe this is all they could come up with. Using a hidden microphone or a drone would be too obvious, and the criminals would notice satellite or GPS signals as well. Yet hopefully, they are not aware of the recent advances in monitoring of the water column. To let his colleagues know where their vessel was headed, he had dropped stones over the guardrail every couple of minutes. The idea was so old school, no one would expect it. The stones would be noticed by the tagging cameras attached to underwater rock formations or floating gliders, which then sent a signal back to the office. At this point, every inch of the water column underneath the vessel was closely monitored. He was supposed to push some of the criminals overboard into the transparent ocean, thus revealing their identities. Their faces would be all over the internet by the end of the day and their confessions would hopefully uncover the last remaining secrets of the illegal fisheries and opaque data trade. But he is not going to follow the script! Instead, he makes the split decision to jump overboard himself. He can picture the scene at the office perfectly, himself appearing as part of the ocean hologram, as if he was dropped from the ceiling into the room, Dr. Mbatha’s puzzled facial expression. That should give the criminals enough time to disappear. 

The water is cold and refreshing, he feels like his mind is clear and calm for the first time in months. He turns his Aletheia back on - at this point he is not going for subtlety anymore. He realizes that his seemingly flawless view of the ocean was all wrong. Institutions had become powerful due to their access to technologies, they had split the ocean into territories, measured and monitored it, but at the same time forgot about the oceans messy materiality intertwined with our messy humanity. In the last couple of years, the High Seas had felt predictable, demystified, maybe even less exciting to him, but now that he was floating amongst the waves, they are wild and wonderous again. He can’t help but think of all the tech that has gotten him into this situation in the first place; the satellites, the Aletheia, the hologram. His work, his daily life and even his emotions are inextricably linked to technology. While his view of the world was mediated by technology, it was nonetheless his subjective view. He wouldn’t want to change that; it was just time that he acknowledged it. His phone rings and he knows it's Dr. Mbatha before he picks it up. He will have to think of a damn good apology this time.

Credits: 

The text of this story is the copyright of Hannah Marlen Lübker. This image is the copyright of Elias Stern and reproduced with permission.