I’ve worked all my life to perfect this, it has become my life’s meaning, this machine. I’ve done terrible, terrible things to make my imagination possible, left my family, put the best minds to work, and then left them to end up dead, by the hands of their own creation. I turned the most innocent being, the quietest, most wonderful, the very meaning of life, into a killing machine. I made it trust me, through one of the purest people of them all and stabbed its back. And all that for what, this! My wife, my daughter Mira, Mr. Kaimana, the ocean itself, gone, murdered, by the most innocent force of all! And the world just keeps going at its own force.
1999, my cruel life began, I spent my first few years, doing nothing, just trying to fit in. I was different, I had a different connection to everything, especially Water. I found it extremely fascinating, it was like we spoke to each other, we could understand each other. But it never trusted me, never, meanwhile, I was ready to give my life to it.
When I was 21, I immersed myself in the ocean. I knew the tide would never kill me, they would never hurt me, and they didn’t. I spent the night drowning in the ocean, but not a single problem occurred. I found myself in the same spot I started, covered in sand on my crying mother’s lap, with nothing but a tiny crescent-shaped scar in the middle of my back. I knew the water now trusted me. People thought it was suicide, that I was crazy, my mother was so worried, and my father was on the verge of disowning me. But it was all just my experiment, now I knew that Water cared for me.
In 2024, I met the love of my life Darya Sencen, she also loved the water, just like me. She had straight dark brown hair, olive green eyes, and the sweetest smile. A year later we got married and lived happily in a home alongside the beach. But a question lurked inside me, one that I was sure didn’t appear in Darya’s mind…What if I could control the water, what if I could get it to trust me, and I could have access to all its power? But what I didn’t realize was that, to sync with such a magnificent force I had to be as peaceful as it, as ancient, as calm, and have the same energy levels as it.
I started working on a machine, to try and control water. But, I didn’t even know how to start until, in 2026 my daughter was born. Darya named her Mira, after the ocean. She was born looking different from her mother and I. She had thick wavy black hair, teal eyes, and the same crescent-shaped scar I had on her glabella, except she had it as a birthmark it was jet black, while mine was red-ish. That mark always puzzled me, I knew the sea had given it to me as a mark of care, but why was it on my precious daughter? But I dropped all my suspicions, for some time in my life I was content, I’d stopped working on my machine, and was living happily with my family.
But when my daughter turned eight, I noticed something I never had before. I saw my daughter sitting on the shore and controlling a water bubble with her very own hands! I didn’t say anything then, thinking my eyes had deceived me. But the next day I saw her walking on the ocean jumping over the waves! Just then the madness of my mind returned, I remembered my past, and I took out my machine again, this time with a new experiment in mind.
I spent months studying my daughter watching her work with water and I began to join in on the activities they used to do. If they were dancing in the middle of the ocean, then I’d be on a boat dancing with them. If my daughter was swimming underwater and the ocean was making obstacle courses for her I’d ask my daughter to make me an oxygen bubble and try to swim with them. After two long years, I’d finally gained the ocean’s trust again.
It was time for me to start building my machine, and connect it with my daughter’s mind. Every afternoon after I took Mira to the beach, my partner Mr. Kaimana and I would take her to my warehouse to run tests and connect my daughter to the machine. My wife started noticing that I would take Mira to the beach, then to my wear house, and she’d come back drained, with big eye bags, and her hands trembling. Darya asked me what I was doing with her, and told me how it ached her heart to see Mira like that. Every day we would have the same argument, and it always ended with Darya storming away and hugging Mira so tight that it looked like she’d explode. Not, that it didn’t hurt me to see my daughter, so broken, I just didn’t think that the consequences would be so harsh back then, I didn’t know what would happen next, otherwise I would have quit the experiment a long time ago.
Little by little I would drain energy from Mira’s brain unknowingly and give it to my machine. I noticed Mira’s powers were getting weaker and weaker, but I didn’t think there was any reason to worry. Mr. Kaimana did though, he kept warning me that something was wrong and that every day Mira would get a lower and lower ability score, but he understood. But one tragic day, while I was transferring energy Mira let out a blood-curdling scream, her teal eye turned black and she collapsed to the ground. I checked her breathing, and her heartbeat, and used my special brain monitors to see if she was conscious. But my dear daughter had passed that evening. I don’t how long I just stood there in shock and cried my heart out. While I was crying Mr. Kaimana had committed suicide. But what had been done had been done, my machine had been fully charged, and it was time to put it to the test. But first I had to do something far more important and heartbreaking.
I mustered all the courage I could, trying my best not to burst out into tears. I picked up my daughter’s dead body and walked up to my home to break the news to Darya and tell her some of the secrets I was keeping. When I told Darya everything she screamed and clutched her heart tightly. She to the ground and started kicking her legs and hands, and then she got up and started banging her head onto the wall. She asked me the greatest question of my life, “Why? Why did you do this to me, to yourself? Our daughter was magical, and instead of caring for her you turned her into a lab rat, and Mr. Kaimana, he was such a good man! I HATE YOU! NOW DON’T YOU DARE DO ANYTHING TO MY BELOVED OCEAN!”. Along with other words to try and set me straight, she had given me some very good points. Not that I was sane enough to listen. I simply stalked into my office and cried myself to sleep on my chair hearing my wife’s tears.
The next day I came to the ocean with my machine, not Mira. The ocean asked me “Where is Mira” in its own way that I had to learn. I told the ocean about what I was doing, and what had happened, then I suddenly used the machine on it. The ocean was now in my control, my dreams were coming true!
The next few years of my life felt like a blur. Living on an island, I struggled to find acceptance among the people, especially after I heard about Mira. Their rejection made me feel angry, and in a fit of rage, I caused a tsunami to crash down upon the island.
I was the only survivor. I later moved to the main country trying to get away from my past. Even there, people talked about the tsunami, and called it the natural disaster of the century. I am an icon- I can’t enjoy this though. I still have that machine, I still control the ocean and it’s 2049! Sometimes I think, that I’ve given so much to this machine, I should keep it. But all this machine does is turn life into death, and death into life, misbalancing the sacred cycle. My whole life has been about controlling, and now I don’t know what to control, except somehow, myself.
~ Advita Sinha