Day 778

From the surface of the ocean and the boat's limited view, it appeared that an entire pod of whales were doing tail stands, the tips of their fins bolt upright a couple of feet above the water and the rest of them still beneath.

Now one whale doing this for a short while wouldn't be anything too unusual, an entire pod is quite odd but doing so for nine days in a row with minimal movement and no signs that they'd come back up to breath was... well... unheard of and a little disturbing.

At first it was assumed that they were breaching when no attention was on them and that if humans strayed too close they'd interrupt this blatantly "unique behaviour" leading to some kind of catastrophe for the pod. And so the water around them (twenty miles out in all directions) was sectioned off as a "research area".

Five months into the Wavers, as the public had taken to calling them, and marine biologists took their first dives around the pod to explore the situation. They'd set up floating cameras and monitoring equipment all around them and found already that the whales were silent and utterly unmoving, never breaching and never feeding.

The dive team went down during midday when the waters were fairly calm and brightly lit. There had been some kind of reddish cloud developing around the whales, presumed to be faeces or a new species of krill. Nobody wanted to take the obvious, grim answer without witnessing it firsthand and witness, they did.

Past the mist that floated eerily in the water they saw a forest of white with more red - more blood - swirling around like silk scarves in the wind. The whales were dead and by the state of their floating bones they had been for quite some time.

Strangely though there was a great deal of meat around their spines still and their brains looked to be perfectly intact. The dive team came back with small electric prods, used to protect themselves against aggressive fish that got too close, and gently inserted one into the gaping eye socket of the closest adult whale.

It twitched violently, mouth opening and closing as it contorted to face the dive team, head darting forward to close its bristle-filled mouth around them. The current caused  by its movement swirled them into its rib cage, or rather, where the stomach would have been.

The researches floated as still as they could inside the whale's ribs, trying to work out if they had enough spinal tissue to connect to the brain and keep them in a state of suspended animation. After several tense minutes of wondering if they could move out, if their oxygen tanks would last until they got back to the boat or not, they made their move.

The ocean outside of the red, cloudy water was quieter, stiller than they'd ever seen before. The sunlight glinting cheerfully off countless trillions of tiny bones that littered the ocean floor beneath them as they debated how they would, or if they could, tell anyone that the ocean was dead.