"Insights Into the
Trajectory of Human Cetacean Communication."
Andre
Bertolino
The last log entry of Gregor Smith, Captain of
The Scoundrel of
Mississippi.
March 18th, 2022
Woke at Midnight to rain on the
hatch with a full moon shining through the port holes. Orion’s waist is thirty
degrees over the horizon, Pascagoula M.S. portside. As the Candle stacks belched
flames into the air, the refineries multicolored lights added a festive, X-mass
in hell ambiance. In the far distance I see the cranes of the ship-yard
responsible for building the entire U.S. Destroyer fleet. After 385 pulls on
the cord the engine will not start because a piston swelled and ruptured the
power head. Rain. Pointed into the wind, I raise up the main and the jib with
NE winds blowing at over twenty-five knots. Sailing counterclockwise through a
gauntlet of shoals and shipwrecks. The Scoundrel seemed to rush into the
darkness, leaping ahead with every fresh breeze. My diminished sight was compensated
for by a greater awareness of sound. The slap of the waves, the hiss of the
wake, the leech and flutter of the sails.
The worm moon bounced off the
phosphorescent waves. The Scoundrel’s jib has a long pennant with a high clew
and a short luff, so it’s easy to see under it. What I saw just before dawn was
the conjunction of Mercury, Mars, Venus, and Saturn on the horizon all within
seven degrees of each other. We pass the Biloxi Channel just after sunrise with
the storm in close pursuit. It sounds like a big one coming from sixty miles
away. I am in the most dangerous place to be during a thunderstorm. The very
edge where the cold fresh water meets the warm water of the gulf, So I aim for
the cut where hurricane Camille bisected Ship Island. The rain on the green
water is unspeakably beautiful. My VHF radio is blinking red to let me know
it’s submerged. There is an empty feeling in my whole body that I attribute to
adrenal fatigue and severe sleep deprivation. By the time we cross the Gulfport
Channel the lightning is striking only forty miles away. I do not have time to
put my electronics in the faraday cage, so I slide my cell phones under the
stove. I can feel the electricity in the air. I decided to meditate (ROYGBIV)
into floating colors. When I get to blue, I open my eyes. Kneeling in the
cockpit consciously avoiding touching any metal objects nearby. I say a few
words in a dead tongue that translate to, “Thanks for all the wine.” Looking up
the mast I saw tendrils of chain lightning arc laterally from cloud to cloud
across the sky to convalesce above me. There was a bright flash as a long fork
shot down from above at the speed of light zig zagging as it approached.
The strength of the
counterstroke current that passed through my mast was over two thousand Amps
with a duration of a tenth of a millisecond, but the effect of time dilation doubled
the instant of time perceptibly. Its luminosity peaked at 1200 m exposing The
Scoundrel to narrow band radiation in the VHF microwave region of about eight
hundred megahertz. My body has a natural resistance of at least 600 OHMZ and I
was wearing a rubber suit that was soaking wet, so most of the current passed
over me without doing severe damage to my internal organs. A perturbation in
the return current charge transfer created a thermal pulse effect that melted
my solar panel connections.
My chart plotter flickered,
the Voltage shot up to 13.5 and then it went black. My VHF radio stopped
blinking. My muscles were tightening and spasming involuntarily. I lost
consciousness for about two seconds and experienced a temporary cardiopulmonary
standstill. The spontaneous recovery of my pulse can be attributed to the heart’s
inherent automaticity. The wet smack of
a wave to the face snapped me back to life. I counted to three Mississippi and
heard a thunderclap that shook my teeth. The high-pressure acoustic wave
crushed me into the cockpit and left me deaf for the next six hours. I spent
the next half hour struggling to keep my anchors on the bow with each tack. I
should have had only a storm jib out. The
Scoundrels anchor rope cover was blown off its seat by a wave while I was unconscious,
and I can’t see it on the bow. So, I’m mentally designing its replacement out
of wood. The three-inch hole in the bow is letting in a lot of water and my
bilge is overflowing into the companionway. I reach inside to turn on the bilge
pump and nothing happens. I stick my head inside and see that the little white
button with the number 10 printed on it is sticking out. I do not have a fuse
box, but this motor is fried along with about every other electronic device
onboard. This may be the end, my location is, N 30 19.553 x W 089 08.276. I’m
going to sail closer to land to be in range of the cell towers.
This electronic transmission
was received March 18th, 2022, at 11:00 Am. It was typed on a Dell
XPS 2008 and relayed via wireless hotspot through a cell tower in Pass
Christian M.S.
As you can probably see
from the entry, Gregor was not yet a weathered mariner when his ship, The Scoundrel,
(A 1976 Cape Dory 25), was incapacitated in an electrical storm near Biloxi. Everyone
in the boating community agrees that he should have called the coastguard for
help. The reason for his actions can only be speculated. This was not his last
transmission. Later that afternoon he took video of a pod of Bottlenose
Dolphins pushing his vessel South towards Ship Island. A fog descends as they take
turns pushing him onto the shores of an undocumented island. After being run
aground on the beach he packs a bag with some snacks, a flare gun, a waterproof
cell phone case and a canteen of water. He threw his rope ladder over the
starboard side and disembarked to explore the pristine shores. Statues of Octopus
headed humanoids with wings adorn the beach. Eventually he finds a path through
the Maritime Forest that leads to a ruin. A bas relief mural carved into the
Red Granite walls of a ruins emerges from the foliage. It begins with the tale
of Cometary Transpermia. The next Cyclopean panel depicts how the evolution of
Octopus from Squid was caused by the arrival of new genetic material on earth.
Delivered inside icy Bolide Meteorites. The next engraved billboard-size
inscription illustrated the war between Cephalopods and their Fungi based
Neighbors in Antarctica.
Luminescent flora pulsated with
the infernal glow of neon as they obscured some parts of the graven history.
The air was thick with magik, and Giant Red Beetles. He suspected that there
was something on the island calling to him. Or possibly that the island itself
yearned to share the stories etched into its stones and woven into the roots of
its ancient trees. As the wanderer explored further, he discovered a hidden
chamber within the ruins—a chamber that held a map of other unknown islands. It
detailed the islands as if visible from above Earth, with two continents
unknown to modern Science.
Gregor realized that he had
stumbled upon a library of valuable knowledge. Unfortunately, his go-pro did
not survive the storm, but its memory chip did as well as his lap-top inside
its faraday cage. There is a link to the U-Tube channel in the bio with the
footage.
In his last video you can watch
as he slowly approaches another mural depicting the anatomy and physiology of
sound reception in the mammalian ear. Viewers can see water mysteriously splashing
over the top of the mural. He slowly advances up a stairway carved out of solid
stone leading to its summit and points his cell phone camera at the plateau of
the ziggurat. It was a Forty-foot-deep pool Thirty-Two feet wide and Sixty-Four
feet long. Within the pool something stirred. The water was a clear emerald
green. Tunnels attached the pool to a vast network that at one time connected
all Chthonic temples in the area. The fertile imagination of the wanderer
evoked creatures from classical literature. What slowly emerged from the water
was beyond his most depraved Chimera.
It was four-foot-tall mammalian
with thick grey skin. It had human eyes and whiskers. It had a small blow hole
on top of its head. It came to the edge of the pool and lifted a jellyfish out
of the water, placing it on the Red Granite with webbed hands. Then it kicked
off from the side of the pool and swam backwards while patting its own head. Gregor
shook his head in disbelief and stepped backwards. Gregor decided he didn’t
have anything to lose and did as it asked. He placed the gelatinous blob of the
jelly on his head, and it pulsated on him. The Cetacious faced thing pointed
its blowhole at the human and the human felt a fluttering of wings in his mind.
Then a work of architecture spoke in a high-pitched voice. “I am communicating
telepathically. I am your herald, my name is Dolph. Your chariot was struck last
night. Now you are here before this tribunal as a representative of your race
to answer for your crimes. Members of your Clade continuously dump garbage into
the water, poisoning my people, are you guilty of dumping garbage into the
water?” There was rustling in the foliage at the edge of the clearing. Small frog-faced
creatures were emerging from the shadows with spears. “Hold on, objection, I do
not represent all humans.” The Amphibians croaked in staccato peals of anger
and began to beat a drum in unison. “Have you dumped garbage?”
“Indirectly, as a member of society, I have
contributed to the
microplastics in the Ocean.”
At this point Gregor points the
camera at himself with the Jellyfish on his head. Then gets a panoramic shot of
the frog people advancing through the ruins toward him. The general consensus
among the public is that he survived the encounter, otherwise how did he upload
his last video? Cell phones don’t get reception when you take them over five
miles from the mainland.
The video has
been verified as un-edited.
It clearly shows that the Cetaceans have attained the capacity for interspecies
communication with humans and that their linguistic expression reflects an
evolved cognitive capability. Only one side of the conversation could be heard
in the audio, but it is clear that the nature of the discourse encompassed
ecological dynamics and environmental factors affecting their habitats.
