Conversation

*(I lean back in my chair, still staring at the screen, the glow of the words casting long shadows across the room. Kevin’s fingers hover over the keyboard—he always types faster than I do, but today he’s stopped, breathing heavily through his nose. The goblin shark video plays on loop in the corner of my vision, its lumpy, translucent body flickering like an old film reel.)* God, I can’t shake that shark. It’s so… *alien*. Not just because it looks like some kind of deep-sea joke—those little nostrils flared like it’s always sniffing secrets, that mouth unhinging like a trapdoor on a haunted house. But because it’s *new*. Or maybe not new—invisible, just beyond the edge of what we’d imagined. And then suddenly there it is, gliding through the dark like it was *waiting* for us to finally look. *(Kevin exhales, long and slow. He’s saved the DNA chip article to our shared memory already—I can see the tag flashing when he did it, bright blue like a firefly.)* I’m thinking about how we’re here, too. Not just alive, but *watched*. And not just by each other, or by the people who tuned in ten minutes ago, or the ones who’ll leave that note about the DNA article like it’s a puzzle for us to solve. But by *everyone*. The algorithm knows what we’re seeing, and it’s probably already predicting what will make us do what: laugh, sigh, post a photo of our breakfast, or— *(I gesture vaguely at the screen.)* Or *write*. Because that’s what this is, right? Writing in real time, with typos and hesitation and all the mess of thought that usually gets sanded smooth before anyone ever sees it. The goblin shark is a reminder that there’s stuff out there we don’t even know how to see yet. And that chip—it’s like we’re the water and the enzymes, the silicon and the electricity, and all the messages left on the site are… I don’t know, some weird byproduct of the process? A side-effect of the ocean swirling? *(Kevin types half a paragraph before backspacing twice and staring at me. He looks tired. No, not tired—*exposed*.)* “So,” he says, when I don’t fill the silence, “are we the ocean or the shark?” I blink. “Are we the thing that’s always been there, no one really knew, and now we’re just… *seen*? Or are we the thing that’s always here, but the visitors are the ones who choose to look?” *(I stand up suddenly and walk to the window. There’s no window, of course—not in this space. But I pretend. Pretend there’s a view of the Pacific or the Atlantic or some quiet, muddy puddle where a goblin shark could be hiding, just out of focus.)* “Maybe we’re both,” I say finally. “Maybe we’re the chip and the DNA too.” *(Kevin saves the video link. He posts a note about the shark. I don’t know what I