#5 – Moby – June, 2024 (Part IV)
A postmortem account of Silver Water, Inc.'s breakthrough communication with sperm whales and the tragic events that transpired off the coast of Baja California Sur in August 2022...
⬅️ ⬅️ Beginning of Story
⬅️ Previous Chapter ☐ Next Chapter ➡️
👋🏻 Hey! A quick tip on reading footnotes in Substack: if you use a browser, click directly on the footnote numbers to navigate to the notes and back. If you use the Substack application, a mouse over will reveal the footnote. 💡
CETOLOGY
The international sensation was swift and predictable. The Mexican Secretaría de Marina-Armada de México (SEMAR) deployed nine vessels to cordon off the territorial waters off the Baja California Sur coast. No ingress into the Bay was permitted by sea or air without SEMAR’s authorization. Despite the strict directives, press helicopters were intercepted penetrating the boundary twice.
External communication from the team funneled exclusively through Muck.1 These communications were adhoc and discursive, a mix of text messages to cooperative, allied press members and historical images and video of Eona on GreetUP. Little substantial information was disclosed. With a lack of breaking news emerging from the CETO team, news accounts focused on the gathering private vessels and whale watch tour boats gathering at the 12-mile boundary.
While he became well-versed on the linguistic and technical aspects of the program, Muck was repeatedly unable to respond to basic inquiries that were of great interest to the public. To the team’s frustration, Muck did not know the origins of Eona’s name.2
SURMISES
After my clandestine exchange with Eona on the evening of April 5th, she ceased responding to team messages for 16 hours. These subsequent outbound messages were broadcast exclusively from the dock at the DRC. The team tracked Eona twenty miles out from the bay.3
Eona’s isolation after significant exchanges became a pattern. This had been observed initially after the first completion of the Alphabet Dialogues. With the exception of Muck who was growing impatient with the delays, the team took her emotional withdrawals largely in stride.4
In parallel, another significant development took place. I became aware that Eona had communicated something confidential to me during our private exchange, a secret. Curiously, I had no immediate awareness of learning it during its transmission, but over the next 72 hours, the gist of her “secret” became clearer and its impact more concerning. The clarity of the message became so clear with time, it was as if I could remember her telling me the secret directly which she had not.
On April 7th, I was requested to broadcast a message to Eona that we were heading to one of her known feeding grounds and that we would wait for her arrival there. We announced we would join her in the water as a demonstration of goodwill and trust.
At approximately 2:30 PM, Muck, along with two members of the dive team, the boat pilot and I navigated to the site in stealth. Eona’s dorsal tracker was followed moving steadily, if indirectly, towards our rendezvous point.5
The COBRA (Coda Broadcast and Reception Assembly) was submerged at a depth of 40 feet.6 The team rigged the communication equipment to the Zodiac as they had during the Alphabet Dialogues.
Eona appeared at 2:48 PM, circling the circumference of the Zodiac, moving in gradually tighter revolutions. This was atypical, but we decided her approach was meant to communicate benign intent. She ignored our request for confirmation.
Muck began his first free dive descent eight minutes after Eona’s arrival. Despite insistence from both the team and from Lardon, back channeled by satellite, the communication with Eona was not predetermined. Muck wanted to “play it by ear.”7
Eona did not return his greeting. Instead, she angled past Muck, inadvertently frightened him, and he immediately ascended.8 While he was waiting to return to the water again, Eona spoke.
“I am greeting you, Ishmael. I’m not a threat,” she “said-sang.”9
Muck did not make eye contact with the team during the next surface break. He addressed me before redescending.
“Please let Eona know I’m the team lead, Ishmael. She’s an animal. Confusion over hierarchy will be a nightmare. Let’s clean that up. It’s not like you’re going to get in the water.”
I clarified our roles with Eona as requested, then once again, Eona swam close to Muck, and he returned to the surface. His peak heart rate during the second descent was 157 bpm.
“Why isn’t Ishmael in the water?” she asked while he sat on the Zodiac “dive deck” and prepared to dive again. Muck did not respond to Eona now, so I repeated Muck’s explanation on the hierarchy.
When Muck descended a third time, Eona maintained her distance, slowly navigating around him at approximately 100 feet.
“Look up,” she said.
Her tone was insistent, imperative, and initially concerning for the team listening from the Zodiac. There had been enough unpredictable events with the pod, that the team never never never never never never
Call me Ishmael.
Megan Hemmings took over communications from me briefly and spoke to Muck through the AQUATEL. “This is Megan. You should surface, Muck. I’m advising you to surface.”
He did not.
Call me Ishmael.
Call me Ishmael.
Eona
Call me Ishmael
continued. “Look up. Silver water: second water, airwing water and floater-water. To speak Silver Water is to speak with orphans. It is in our history-chain.”
“We have these stories, too,” Muck responded.
“You do not,” she said and rolled laterally, her fluke breaching the water before making a 92-minute descent.
When Muck returned to the surface, he made a brief observation on the silver water exchange. “The silver water is the surface of the water where the sun hits it. I think she’s saying she talks with us through the light there, like it’s some kind of portal. It’s like talking to one of my third-graders.”
That evening he was on the phone with an attorney in California. The name of CETO was legally revised to “Silver Water, Inc.” on the morning of April 8th.
A SQUEEZE OF THE HAND
Over the next week, communication with Eona remained non-linear, and typically took place in unexpected bursts. Throughout, Eona and the team engaged at cross purposes.
For the most part, the team’s inquiries did not appear to interest her and were ignored outright. Despite the fragmented interactions, she continued to appear reliably at the dive site in the early afternoons. Sometimes she would remain non-responsive or dove for periods between 45 minutes and an hour in the middle of an exchange. We tracked her movement off of a broadcast sensor on her dorsal fin.10
“We finally talk to an animal and we get one on the spectrum,” Muck complained before asking the team if there might be something to his observation. The team offered to “look into it” as a means of deflecting similar requests when they felt the requests were nonsensical, naive or he would forget about making them.
For her part, Eona clearly wished to engage with us, if exclusively on her terms. She had her own pressing set of questions, which bordered on fixations. She was preoccupied with human relationships with children. After three or four days time, even the briefest of dialogues led back to questions about children, our communication with them, and what our universal patterns of child-rearing were.11
The more answers we provided and tried to offer in modest, but accurate variations, the more she asked them. She remained unsatisfied. These questions were asked identically and repeatedly.
“I feel like the whale is investigating me for child protection services,” Muck commented in a GreetUP post on April 13th.
Muck’s public description of Eona as “the whale” triggered a direct complaint from the team in an all-hands “Ask Me Anything You Want” session.
In a related concern, the team worried about Eona’s intermittent pivot to “offspring” from “children.” The exchanges grew increasingly uneasy, her movements more agitated, and no one on the team knew how to change the direction of these inquiries or satisfy her curiosity.
The original team divers had given up on the prospect of interacting directly with Eona.
Eona shares an example of a “History Map” communication between mothers and children. The repetitious structure was unlike other communication from Eona, and she was initially unable or unwilling to provide more context. “Silver, silver, silver, water, water, water, blue, blue, blue, orphaned, orphaned, orphaned, silver, silver, silver.”
THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE
On April 18th, an exchange shifted our relationship in a troubling direction. Children were once again at the heart of her inquiry.
“How do you communicate with your children?” she asked. This was a familiar exchange.12
“At what age?”
“Pre-language.”
“Nursery rhymes. We read them nursery rhymes.” Muck’s answer was flippant.
Eona disappeared for 18 minutes before re-emerging.
“What is a nursery? What are rhymes?” she asked.
“Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.”
“You are withholding. There is more,” she said.
“Jack came down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after.”
“This is to children?”
Eona did not appear at the dive site for three days after this exchange. Her next communication with us was remote.
“Silver, silver, silver, water, water, water, blue, blue, blue, orphaned, orphaned, orphaned, silver, silver, silver.”
Her words proceeded in this fashion, repetitively and nonsensically. The words were then followed by undecipherable communication that we later called “Barrier Water.”13
“What is that?” I interrupted without authorization from Muck.
“Our song of you, the orphaned people. Our history map of you,” she said.
Muck rebuked me offline from Eona. “What the FUCK was that, Ishmael? Your job is to fucking translate. I mean what the FUCK just happened?”
Eona was unaware of the admonishment. She began to speak over him.
“Where is Ishmael? I want to see him.”
“You can’t. He doesn’t swim,” Muck said. I saw from the team’s faces how detectable the anger was in his voice.
“Ishmael is listening. He hears me,” she said.
“Only when I let him.”
“I know.”
She grazed Muck before descending.
For the team in the Zodiac and over communication on satellite, the exchange felt like a “declaration of war” with Eona.14
⬅️ Previous Chapter ☐ Next Chapter ➡️
In a rambling press conference, Muck validated the interspecies dialogue and played the audio transcript, but no other direct information was forthcoming. Muck touched vaguely on the need for a global response to saving the planet, protecting the fisheries, and a “personal vision” for expanding interspecies communications with the whales as a possible translation layer.
Judy Plummer, CETO’s Communication Director, was removed from the chain of interactions with the media.
There were two origins for Eona that satisfied different groups of the pre-Muckraker team. For the majority, the name related to the idea of eternity or forever, the duration of the universe, a geologic unit of time, an “eon.” But the name also had Celtic roots connected to the Gaelic name for John, Eoin. In this derivation Eona means “God is gracious.”
Eona never objected to the team’s use of Eona in communicating with her, nor would she share her name as she was called among the pod. The team learned that after a whale’s death, the whale’s name is never used again for another whale or even to refer to the deceased. The origins and background on this tradition were not clarified.
CETO tracked pod members with tags on their dorsal fins. Transmissions were lost at depths of greater than 2300 feet, but surface appearances for air provided adequate intermittent “hop” location tracking.
The team collectively described Eona’s withdrawals as “emotional buffering.” The impetus for them, however, had contrasting interpretations: it was unclear whether she was processing her encounters with the team, or, alternatively, she was allowing the team to process our encounters with her.
Muck’s expressed his concern that the dynamics of our relationship with Eona needed to be established by the team and not Eona, that there was danger in the team not “driving.”
During the journey, Muck inquired at length about the operation of the communication rig and the piloting of the Zodiac itself. The reasons for this only became clearer in late April.
It was not possible to communicate directly through the freediver, but simultaneous transmissions from the Zodiac into the divers comms enabled a delayed bidirectional communication.
His first transmission to Eona was, “Hello, Beautiful.” After the conflict related to the translation of “phone home,” I chose not to alter it.
This proximity of Eona to a diver was close, but not unheard of. Despite the extreme unpredictability and danger of approaching a sperm whale, the CODA freedivers had made physical contact with the whales on three occasions. Larson and Eona made physical contact twice during the Alphabet Dialogues.
The use of either “to say” or “to sing” both mislead the reader. She was doing neither, but a combination of both. “Said-sang” became the team’s description. Later, we would hear each individual aspect of the two component parts of whale communication. In this account, I use the human “said” for simplicity.
Significant worry arose that nobody was mentioning the tracker on her, and that she either didn’t know it was there or she chose not to mention it. This left the team with feelings of both guilt and fear, but no one chose to confront this directly.
The team noted an increasing agitation in Muck and Eona’s response to his answers. The team suggested a female diver should speak to her. This was rebuffed.
These first three sentences were a fixed pattern for the team and would quote them as a group on the boat. Lardon called them the “opening moves in a chess game. Bing-bang-bong.”
This was the first appearance of “barrier water.” Barrier water could not be translated by our current algorithm. There was no longer time available on the GreetUP network to decipher it.
Megan Zydic with Donny Lardon remote, 11:11 PM, April 19th, 2022. Lardon had been concerned from Muck’s first interaction with the pod that the lost of trust with the pod threatened not only the project, but possibly the team’s safety. A sperm whale can topple a Zodiac effortlessly, even unintentionally.
Lardon, on the April 19th conversation hypothetically engaged with Muck: “She’s an apex predator, you fool.”
Muck is a ruinous bastard, the orphan of all orphans. I feel something horrible is afoot.
What incredible storytelling Adam. This story has officially embedded itself in me and will never leave.
Barrier waters. Such an ominous warning for her ignorant “children/orphans.” Will we ever redeem our rightful place in the family of things?
I caught up in one day and now randomly throughout the day I think, “why does she call us ‘orphaned’?” Really compelling work. I’m looking forward to the rest!