When we buried the river, we left an entire ecosystem to adapt to darkness and all the rot we thoughtlessly threw below. All we were concerned with was building higher and higher and as long as the river flowed out to the sea somewhere deep below our perfect city all was well.
If the estuary was black, if the banks were strewn with the corpses of whatever marine life didn't or couldn't adapt fast enough, if the surrounding land looked scorched and strange creatures were sighted coming out of the river - it's simply how things are supposed to be. Isn't nature bizarre and amazing?
That's what we were told at least and while the denizens of the river stayed in their space, everything was fine. Until fins began to grow into hands and they learnt how to use ladders, doors and tools. Until they dammed the river and exposed centuries of our pollution. Until the ninth maintenance team we sent down there failed to return.
Unmanned drones were the apparent solution - if they went down then we hadn't lost a person... again. They were so certain that they'd find nothing, that all the rumours of fishfolk were only rumours, that they livestreamed the footage and broadcast the truth to the world.
The first things they encountered were a kind of hairless otter, about six feet in length and with paws that were dexterous enough for them to have figured out how to use the maintenance worker's phones, scrolling through their feeds and accidentally posting - something that had long fuelled the rumours of them running away to start new lives instead of heading down to the river.
Once they lost interest and the drone was able to descend slightly to pass over the dam we found clusters of hard hats moving about, lights flashing and flickering as their batteries slowly died. They made the mistake of moving down instead of zooming the camera and something nagged the drone, pulling it into the dam and into a nest full of what looked like skulls at first.
Slowly, the skulls rotated in their hard hats to reveal swarms of crustacean-esque legs as they leapt towards the drone. It was easy enough to guess what had happened to all the workers after that and now there are plans being carelessly floated about to just seal the river off and wait for everything to die out.
A slow and secret suffocation is somehow easier than owning up to our mistakes.
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