{"id":3682,"date":"2022-04-24T13:48:20","date_gmt":"2022-04-24T13:48:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3682"},"modified":"2022-04-27T18:09:27","modified_gmt":"2022-04-27T18:09:27","slug":"the-memory-of-water-by-tegan-moore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3682","title":{"rendered":"The Memory of Water by Tegan Moore"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Memory of Water<\/em><\/strong> by Tegan Moore (Clarkesworld<\/em> #186, March 2022) gets off to a cheery start with Michelle, the manager of a leisure attraction\/conference centre called Ocean, thinking about her dead partner James while she eavesdrops on two marine biologists lamenting the near total destruction of the ocean\u2019s ecosystems and the death of the last whale. As one of the speakers trails off into tears, Michelle gets a message that customers are complaining about one of the rides (again).
The rest of the story sees Michelle, and her assistant Helen Ali, troubleshoot the problem on the Living Water ride, and they begin by trying to observe the problem:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A whalelike mosasaur undulated past in the greenish darkness, circling the car. Its massive, toothed face cut sideways to snatch a passing fish. With Helen distracted, Camille was alone with the monster. Adrenaline twitched her muscles. The creature swept toward her in the slow-motion of enormous things, front flippers stroking, then back flippers, spine, and tail rippling to the rhythm of Camille\u2019s breath. It came at her like inevitability, the same slow steady descending march of her marriage wearing thin, then the separation, then James\u2019 terminal diagnosis, everything coming apart at once. He\u2019d barely been back in Charleston for two weeks before he\u2019d found out how sick he was. Maybe reaching out to tell her had been some kind of appeal, but how could she forgive so much, so fast? He\u2019d left her. And then he\u2019d wanted her to comfort him as he left her again. Before the mosasaur could reach the car, silver flashed overhead, a shiver of mercury: the bait ball, the out-of-place, rapidly orbiting school of small fish that wasn\u2019t supposed to appear in the attraction\u2014in the ocean\u2014for millions of years. Heart in her throat, Camille pointed, but Helen had seen it.
They watched the bug duplicate itself again, again. The mosasaur swam through its edge, holographics glitching as they bounced through each other.  p. 45-46<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

After the pair get off the ride (which is not particularly well described\u2014I found it hard to visualise the physical and hologram spaces), various theories are advanced for the fault: a software bug; a disgruntled former employee; the spirit of the ocean haunting millennials for their complicity in killing the seas . . . .
The problem continues to rumble on throughout the story, accompanied by various other plot threads (spoiler): faults manifest in different attractions; media and celebrities arrive for a conference speech to mark the recent death of the last whale; Michelle continues to think about James\u2019s death. Eventually this all comes to a climax when one of the biologists gives a speech and (unscheduled and unprogrammed) manta rays appear in the hologram slabs\u2014and then leave that space and swim in the air between them. The story concludes with Michelle, as the centre is being evacuated, waiting for a huge, dark shape\u2014presumably the last whale\u2014 coming towards her out of the hologram slabs.
This didn\u2019t work for me for a number of reasons: first, I\u2019m not that keen on ghosts in the machine, i.e. fantasy events in a science fiction story; second, I didn\u2019t understand the ending (what is Michelle \u201cwaiting to understand\u201d as the whale approaches, and how does this connect to her thoughts about her dead partner?); third, the repeated mention of her ex-partner comes over as personal problem boilerplate (often mentioned but having little emotional heft); and, finally, I\u2019m not a fan of nihilistic and pointless eco-doom stories.
* (Mediocre). 9,150 words. Story link<\/a>.

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Memory of Water by Tegan Moore (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) gets off to a cheery start with Michelle, the manager of a leisure attraction\/conference centre called Ocean, thinking about her dead partner James while she eavesdrops on two marine biologists lamenting the near total destruction of the ocean\u2019s ecosystems and the death of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[879],"tags":[21,539,622,881,883,7,880],"class_list":["post-3682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tegan-moore","tag-21","tag-539","tag-clarkesworld","tag-eco-doom","tag-ghosts-in-the-machine","tag-novelette","tag-tegan-moore"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3682"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3720,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682\/revisions\/3720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}