Born Predators - Chapter 2

Scent of mammal

        Her hearing used her whole body, like a ten-foot ear drum on which the rhythm of the oceans played a story of intensity and direction. Overlayed on those sounds, scents in the water lit the picture of her prey from the molecules they left behind. In her head, spongy sensors unique to sharks sensed the electric currents around her and telegraphed the fleeing heart beats of her prey.

        These senses let her know the rocky paths of the sea floor, the smooth sand below. She knew the large bays that gathered rivers across the coast and cocktailed seawater with fresh. Her brain and body catalogued the glacial cracks and hidden valleys where the base of the ocean bunched up to form rocky outcrops. They tasted when she passed the iron tang of large cities and the chocolate mud of marshes. Her senses knew this path from previous summers, along the coast, past the bay of crabs, the smell of human ships and then the long stretch of marshes.

        She didn’t swim a straight line. She zig-zagged along the route, now inshore, now offshore. Eyes open, mouth open, senses open, her brain integrated the ocean. For decades her journey along this coast had been for her, now it was for her young. Toward the food she needed for them.

Chapter 2

        “Jamie’s in the water!”

        Puja dashed down the yacht’s main stairs, kicking her heels aside to sprint without stumbling. The entire party on the yacht was in pandemonium. Deck lights had sprung alive to add to the strings of party lights on all three decks, shining out into the dark bay in the hours after midnight. Jamie was the world’s most brilliant artificial intelligence designer, and also Puja’s oldest friend in the company. Cofounder. She was the CEO, but he was the quixotic architect of their greatest triumphs.

        She raced toward the stern - where Jamie had jumped over the railings into the dark bay. Somehow already there, Laszlo Horn stood at the railing with an intense expression, watching his phone with hooded eyes.

        “What happened?” Puja shouted as she raced across the deck. Laszlo turned toward her, aloof and tall and impeccably dressed. His blond beard trimmed and his ice blue eyes were always sharply critical. Laszlo was one of their company’s first and biggest investors, and one of their chief navigators through the chaotic world of global Artificial Intelligence. Laszlo had insisted on this huge company party. He’d handed many drinks to Jaime to celebrate their successes. How had everything disintegrated?

        “He jumped. He threw himself in. In the middle of…” Laszlo paused.

        “They’re saying there’s a shark! How do they know?”  Puja tried to break through Laszlo’s odd distraction. She was unlike him in nearly every way – but had learned to read his moods.

        “Someone in Contracts. They showed me…” Laszlo muttered. “It’s a phone app called Triton that shows where tagged sharks are,” He tuned the phone towards Puja, displaying a rapidly blinking red star on a map of Hampton Bay.

        “Laszlo, how could this go so wrong?” Puja leaned over the railing “Jaime! There’s a shark!”

        “The Harbor Patrol can be here in 15 minutes,” Lazlo reported, pocketing his phone and looking evenly at Puja.

        “Would you want to fight off a shark for 15 minutes?” Puja snapped. She wheeled around to the small floating deck where an inflatable dingy was tied. She yelled to the crew, hiked up her deep blue silk dress, and jumped onboard, starting to clumsily untie the knots. A crew member from the yacht stepped in beside her, skillfully released the little boat, and fired the tiny electric motor.

        “That way!” Puja gestured into the night. “He’s somewhere over there!”

        “It’s an inflatable boat, Puja.” Laszlo mentioned calmly.

        Puja ignored him and they pulled away from the light and tumult of the party, toward the dark choppy waters.

        “Jamie! There’s a SHARK!” she screamed into the night.

***

        Puja focused her attention on the nearby waves, shining her phone light out into the night. Jaime had a boat around here somewhere, Puja knew. His little solace in a work world that had become increasingly tense for him. Jaime’s own successes focused the world on him. And for him that was intense pressure, a pressure Puja tried constantly to alleviate. It was him against the world, he said.

        Puja thought He’ll go to his boat.

        Marianne, the skipper, now was swearing at the engine. The small electric motor was under powered and sputtering, not meant for trips in a rising wind.

        “Get us out there!” Puja insisted.

        Their boat suddenly slewed sideways, “What is this? What’s pushing us around?” A wave crashed into their side, like something large had surfaced and quickly retreated. Puja was thrown against the inflatable side of the dinghy. The boat’s spin increased. “Can sharks do that?”      

        “Don’t know!”  Marianne jostled the motor in its mount with both hands, “Tide’s changing fast, sucking water out the harbor mouth, maybe spinning us around.”

        “Can the tide do that!?” Puja yelled, hanging on as the tiny boat spun.

        “Not…usually…” Marianne grunted as she popped the cowling off the engine. “Keep a watch out for anything like a fin slicing toward us while I deal with this piece of shit engine.”

        “Do real sharks come at boats with their mouth open above the surface and teeth out? Like in the movies?”

        “Just watch!” Marianne insisted as she jiggled the engine’s battery.

        Getting spun around made Puja lose her bearings. The dark bay swallowed all the normal landmarks. Which direction to go in? The dinghy swerved as the propeller bit. They spun rapidly toward an open expanse of water some hundred yards across. Puja held onto the dinghy’s inflated sides and tried to see. Beyond the open water - what looked like small blinking lights – maybe on moored boats.

***

        The right boat! He found the right boat!

        The miracle washed over Jamie’s panic. There sat Sagaponack, his tiny boat. The lone light in her rigging gleamed back, and the bobbing gold letters of her name created relief in him so strong he started shaking. Just a bit higher, glinting from the stern gunwale, was the stainless-steel lifeline of his boarding ladder. It was folded up out of the water like he left it. One good surge from Jamie’s adrenaline-powered body would reach it. He was sure he could break the line holding it up with a strong pull.

        He paused for a second, bobbing, gasping for breath, ten yards away from safety, twisting in the dark water, searching for a telltale fin. A swirl of harbor water built up again around him, spinning him. And then, he felt something below. He was lifted by some unseen current, and this time he definitely felt something scrape against his leg.

        It was immediate, his panic reaction this close to safety, so close to pulling himself gasping but whole onto the Sagaponack’s deck. In his mind, he imagined his foot scraping across grey sandpaper skin. He imagined the teeth in multiple rows, black eyes and gnashing death rising through the dark water towards him. It twisted in a pirouette of hunger as it rose through dark waters – it had no need to see him, it could hear him flailing. It could sense the electric panic of his racing heart. Even in the dark it could find him. His primal fear imagined the mouth opening, eyes rolling back, the jaws reaching out, teeth pivoting toward him like sharp serrated knives. They were closing on him, slicing through him, ripping him in two.

        Jamie screamed at the top of his lungs, not in fear but in fury at being so close. He lunged upwards toward the ladder that could save him, legs churning, arms beating the surface of the bay and reaching, straining, grasping for his life.

***

        Puja could see him! Rapid splashings were just visible in the dark distance! At this range, hidden among the boats, white lacings of churned water caught the thin light. It was Jamie! And he was almost at his boat. Puja squinted to see if there was a fin behind him.

        Then Puja saw Jaime, in the distance in the dark, lunging high, one arm straining to grasp a chrome ladder of the small sailboat. His face showed a sudden rictus of fear.

        That’s when Puja dimly saw him teetering on safety. Half his body was out of the water with this massive effort, when a shadow appeared on the boat, and he suddenly fell back. She saw him smashing into the water with a frantic kicking of his legs. A sick ‘chunk’ came across the Bay, the sound a fraction of a second behind the image of him falling, his body plummeting suddenly, violently into the midst of a huge surge as the ladder chopped down on him. An eruption of seawater and churn swallowed him up: chest, then head, then arms. He sank, still straining, and disappeared into the sick froth. The sea boiled over him, washing over the gunwales into the boat.

        And…then…quiet. All Puja saw were waves on the dark surface, rippling away from the scene as though nothing had happened at all. As if the depths were now empty. As if the Bay was now safe. There was no hint of anyone in the water. Or on the boat.

        Puja stared at the swirl where Jamie had been. She strained to see, and waited for him to surface. Trying not to count the seconds.

        The water remained black and empty, lapping at the small boat’s hull. The twisted ladder, dangling broken from the boat, smacked the hull faintly with each small ripple. The sounds were like an aluminum heart beat. Fainter and fainter as even the ripples died.

        And the seconds added up.

        “Jamie!” Puja screamed, “Jamie!” tears staining her eyes, the full force of the disaster sweeping over her. Something – someone - had reached out into this incredibly important, difficult night and killed her friend with a crushing blow. And let the sea close cruelly over him.

        “Holy shit,” Marianne gasped. “It got him. The shark got him.”

        “What? NO!” Puja cried, “There was something on the boat. At the ladder. But then they…”

        Marianne’s breath came in bursts. “There’s nobody on that boat! That huge splash was the shark!”

        “We have to go help him! He might still be alive.”

        Marianne was afraid, “This tiny inflatable is no match for a giant shark.”

        “It wasn’t a shark! We have to find him!”

        “We’ll go back to the yacht, and lead the Harbor Patrol here. They’ll get here faster that way.” Against all Puja’s arguments, they moved away.

        Puja stared back toward the little sailboat intently, but there wasn’t a ripple. Jamie never surfaced.

        Marianne continued to talk about the shark, the huge splash, the fear on Jamie’s face. A hundred phones were already broadcasting their horror and grief, uploading grainy low-light videos of the dinghy and Puja calling SHARK!  No clarity except a human fear and dread.  A violent splash. A giant shark.

        In minutes the story was racing across every social media network in the world: AI wunderkind Jamie Brinson, dead at twenty-seven of a shark attack.