New Orbit Magazine Issue 08; Feb 2020, The Future of Animals

she’d thought in those terms, trying not to
picture her last image of X-StingWisher, her
International Fire Corps Local Team Deputy
Leader – and lover, she’d hoped – throwing
his already badly injured body onto the
burning tree in a last-ditch attempt to stifle
out the flames that threatened to engulf it
and destroy it forever.
industry’s by-product waste with which we so
littered their environment – we’ve helped
them to help us: they’ve become plastic-waste
eating-machines!”
Their team had failed, their hydrated
sand quota exceeded, and another of the last
few hectares of rain-forest was lost to the Fifty
Year Inferno… and the team was temporarily
disbanded – they’d all earned their rest, the
hardest of hard ways – and she’d been sent,
seemingly without any sense of irony, to the
ocean. To get her feelings back.
She refocused on the InfoStream.
“And then, in 2047, the SeeWorld Shark
& Ray Foundation’s Saviour Scheme was represented
to the UN Emergency Council for
Oceans and Seas, and this time, was
accepted.”
She was vaguely aware of a strange backeddy
between waves, requiring her to adjust
her stance. She bent one knee, pushed her
weight through the straighter leg, and twisted
her hips into the slope, as she’d been taught,
righting her balance and completing a neat
about-turn. The turbulence passed.
“With UN funding and SeeWorld
guidance, scientists across the globe worked
hard to genetically engineer the few
remaining species of shark, starting with the
Mako, to achieve a rapid adaptive evolution
into a genus of creatures that could thrive on
the plastics they couldn’t help consuming.
In essence, they became positively instead
of negatively corrupted by the petro-chemical
The -Stream’s voice was irritatingly
enthusiastic, invasively insistent (like
someone else). She worked hard to contain
her feelings of exasperation with it.
“And what’s the up-shot of this
remarkable achievement? Well, the sharks’
populations are booming… and the amount
of plastic waste in our seas is steadily
decreasing… proportionally. Re-sult!”
So: a solution for the emulsion, quipped
4DickenSake.
I thought I’d requested privacy?! JazzMind
snapped back.
You did… hmmmn, he responded.
It felt regretful, like an apology, of sorts…
but not really sincere; he didn’t actually
express remorse for Trojan-Ghosting her. She