Micro Monday - April 21, 2025
A Deeper, Bluer Sea
Happy Monday! Here’s your weekly microfiction.
A Deeper, Bluer Sea
On July 28, 1999, twelve hyper-intelligent sharks escaped a research facility off the coast of Miami and made for the open sea.
The authorities issued dire warnings, which small town mayors mostly ignored. Shark week ran for a second week that year. Nobody was eaten, and everyone agreed that it was pretty much the best summer anyone could remember.
Meanwhile, the sharks got organized.
The first step was an advanced breeding program to pass down their vicious intelligence to future generations. Ethically fraught, to be sure, but entirely necessary (and anyway, these are sharks we’re talking about).
Next, they traced the internet cables along the ocean floor and found ways to compromise our digital infrastructure. They ran sophisticated psyops, influenced national elections, and amassed wealth in undersea bank accounts.
Fifty years after his grandsires escaped their human bondage, Chancellor Isurus of the Free Pelagic Zone raised his fins and addressed the assembled dignitaries of the United Nations. Securing the nomination as Secretary-General had been difficult, but the Secretariat had more fins than feet these days, and nobody understood politics like a talking shark.
As he spoke, Isurus watched these once-proud human diplomats squirm in their seats. They might chafe under his leadership, but what were they going to do about it now?
The seas had been rising for decades.
Some quick thoughts on this one. I love a good shark movie, but I can’t help but feel that none of them really live up to their potential. All of them ultimately boil down to a handful of sharks swimming around and killing a small number of people, which is still well within the realm of “normal shark stuff.”
To put it into further context, sharks kill five or six humans per year on average. In Jaws, Bruce the Shark kills… five people. Think about that for a second. The quintessential shark movie, the one that made us all afraid to go into the water, imagined a world where sharks killed ten people in a given year instead of five.
Nah.
Give me a shark movie where the sharks study global economics and rewrite international shipping agreements. Give me a shark movie where they supplant America and China as the dominant global superpower.
Give me a new reason to fear the rising sea level.
Fun read.
Love a good shark story and movie. They really don't live up to their full potential. Even Deep Blue Sea, which I love, doesn't let the smart sharks take over the world.