Pacific Clean-Up

I’ve been assigned a job on the pacific coast, on an outpost in Cairns, Eastern Australia. The initiative is to clean up the great barrier reef, fixing the mistake our families had made decades ago. Our task is to clean up and dispose of the trash left in the ocean and surrounding reefs,  a culmination of years of consumerism mixed with ignorance guided laziness. I’ve heard that the seas used to be filled to the brim with colorful wildlife, and a painted landscape of rainbow coral shaped like dinner plates. I try to imagine the grey water before me brimming with the parrotfish, jellyfish, sea snakes, and manta rays I’ve seen from the pictures, but nothing comes up. I guess it must have been beautiful at some point..

I begin to walk out of the loading dock when Baxter Greene stops me. Baxter is exactly what you’d picture when you think of a leader, and that’s the title the government has given him. He’s tall, with a gruff voice, short grey hair, a backwards baseball cap drooping over a black eyepatch, and big muscular arms. We all get the feeling that he’s the type of person who’s experienced things we’ve never even dreamed of. Even though he’s been here just as long as all of us. 

Baxter’s never paid much attention to me, so I’m surprised he’s even noticed me at all. As he says my name, I look around the rest of the dock, trying to focus my eyes on anything that’s not him. I’m encapsulated by a giant metal arched ceiling, stocked with inflatable orange rescue boats accompanied by men and women wearing government standard spandex blue and grey rescue suits. They wear black helmets, hurrying around me, loading trash on and off of boats and staring at holographic computer screens, learning details about their next assignment.

    “….Eric?” Baxter asks again. My eyes were so intent on distracting themselves from him that I forgot to listen to what he had to say. I feel a rise in tension blanket itself over the room.

I nod, indicating that I understood, but Baxter runs through the monologue again. I can’t seem to focus. I drift away for a second time, concentrating on a particular fluorescent red raft that’s made its way onto the dock. I’ve only seen this type of vehicle once before- it’s a DNA transfer drifter, a boat with the sole purpose of harvesting a particular sea creature’s sperm so that they can one day be released back into the reef. If we ever get the job done. I can barely make out the faded writing on the side of the raft, but I recognize an O”, and the letters seem to fill themselves in. This is an octopus transfer boat.

I’ve seen an octopus in the training video Baxter shows to all his recruits on their first days at the dock. There was a man scuba diving with it, gliding along the reef, explaining the different colors it could turn itself into. I’ve never known any animal able to do that, and I was mesmerized by it’s array of abilities, all the shapes it could form and all the tight spaces it could fit. Sometimes I’d wish to form into someone new, someone with an open world to explore right in front of them, just like all the animals we were trying to bring back. I begin to imagine myself swimming with the octopus, when a new voice enters the conversation.

“Hello…Eric… I am your partner.” This was a new voice. This one was metallic, cold, and artificial. It sounded like it could belong to any shape of person, a pale imitation trying to take its form and fool us.  Just like an octopus. 

“Eric, this is REEF, part of the new DEEP model. REEF will be assisting you on your cleanup today,” Baxter explains. “Which starts in about two minutes.”

I have seen a few cyborgs around the station before, but never had any real interactions with them before. I recognize the good that they do, but their whole presence… was a little unnerving. They have extremely life-like human faces, but once you reach their foreheads, their skin just kind of, stops. The rest of their body is made up of antenna-like metallic limbs and torsos, almost like the designer was trying to paint something that resembled a human but stopped after the face. All that remained below were shiny frames, concepts of arms and legs that never got finished. They moved in a steady fashion, as if they had meticulously planned out all of their movements the day before. And I had never been motivated to strike up a conversation with them because I knew that someone had already predicted what I was going to say and programmed a response. Nothing about cyborgs felt real. And I wanted to keep my distance.

I ignored this for the moment, as we had a job to do, and shook REEF’s hand to get straight to work. We pulled out the orange inflatable raft, and set sail for the murky grey waters of Queensland. We sailed past what seemed like miles of remnants of palm trees, as the cloudy waters splashed over our boat. Finally, we pulled into a little inlet, placed at the side of an ash covered mountain. I assumed the area must have been very tropical decades ago.

REEF and I put on our scuba masks, although I wasn’t really sure he needed one, and hopped into the sea. I turned on my lights, and began to suck up each and every piece of plastic and netting I could find with my high-tech vacuum. It seemed like soda cans and fishing gear played the part of fish in this ocean, as they swam as far as the eye could see. 

REEF was much faster than me. He sucked up the litter at five times the rate I could, which I could prove by the meter on my suit. He swam around with what seemed like joy, examining every rock and piece of dead coral after it was cleaned. It looked like he had a sort of fascination surrounding the area, just like I did when watching the training videos for the first time. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would program a cyborg to have a sense of wonder and a need to discover, as it didn’t really help with the process of cleaning up. If anything, it slowed us down. But when I looked into the eyes, I thought about all of the recruits sitting next to me when we first arrived, seeing what the ocean used to look like with their own eyes. I thought about this for a moment, but I eventually dismissed the shimmer on his face as the result of the reflection from my suit. He didn’t care, he was just doing as he was built. Maybe there was some kind of lag in his process. 

But then I was proven wrong. As these thoughts crossed my mind, I struggled to pull in a stray coke can lodged in between a rock and a highly stubborn piece of coral. REEF took notice of this, and began to aim his vacuum in preparation to assist me. I remembered the thousands of pieces of waste he had gathered today, and the amount of progress he had made for these waters. I couldn’t help but feel a little envious. I was the one who signed up to make a difference, not him. 

And so, he stopped. 

Maybe it was the expression on my face, or the way I was starting to holding my vacuum, but REEF seemed to take notice of how I was feeling. He tucked his vacuum into his arm’s compartment, and simply let me take the wheel. He somehow noticed me feeling inferior, and so he let me have this one. He just sat back and watched me do what I could to unwedge the can from its resting place. And, after a few minutes, when I finally achieved my goal, we swam up together. I was focused on the boat, but I’m pretty sure I could see him smile. Maybe, like the octopus, he was a lot smarter than I seemed to think.

On the boat ride back, I began to ask him some personal questions. I didn’t even know cyborgs had a personal life, but he came with an answer to every question. He was from Brisbane, his favorite animal was a seastar, his favorite movie was Dazed and Confused, and his favorite band was Queen. These were very specific answers for a sentient computer, but they matched a few of my interests, so we continued on. We told each other about our pasts, how I was from Indiana and wanted to become an astronaut to join the colonies on Mars before they filled up, and how I was inspired to come here by some old pictures I spotted in a museum. He told me about Brisbane, and how he was built to transfer DNA to its dock, until he came across some data of how this area used to look, and quickly decided to come here. He showed me pictures of the great barrier reef, which I had seen before, and told me a joke about an octopus tickling people, which I had heard before. I invited REEF to play cards with me in my room later that night, which felt kind of embarrassing, as humans don’t normally hang out with cyborgs. But the company was nice, and REEF suddenly felt more human than I lot of people I’d known.