#5 – Moby – June, 2024 (Part V)
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 ➡️
👋🏻 A quick tip on reading footnotes in Substack: if you use a browser , you can click on the footnote numbers to navigate to directly to them and back again. If you use the Substack application, a mouse over will reveal the footnote. 💡
THE CASTAWAY
On April 19th, 2022 at 2:41 AM, Eona resumed “backchannel” contact. She hadn’t approached me directly since she abruptly ended our dialogue on April 5th at 4:38 AM. This time, she was preoccupied with the power structure and dynamics of the Silver Water team.
In particular, she wanted to understand why I wasn’t the lead member conversing with her in the water.1 She had related questions regarding Donny Larson’s surprise departure. In the same way she ignored many of the team’s questions, I modeled my own silence after her and elected not to respond to her. I ended our communication that night.
Call me Ishmael.
Eona allowed me to pursue my own line of questioning. This occurred because of her sense that I was the alpha among the Silver Water team. I believe she engaged with me deferentially out of her own instincts in her pod. Notwithstanding the unexpected power dynamics, my inquiries required multiple passes to clarify my questions.
I summarize below the fragmented dialogue that took place over four consecutive nights from April 20th to April 23rd. She had repeatedly referred to “history-chains.” I asked her to expand.
“History passes from the mother to the child. We are sand maps of what has come before.”
“All cetaceans do this?”
“Everything that lives does this. You do not. You have no history. Neither are you split. You are orphaned.”
“Why are we orphaned?”
She repeated herself often, and she did so here.
“Everything that lives does this. You do not. You have no history. Neither are you split. You are orphaned. You spoke with no one. Now you speak with us, Ishmael.”2
“So we are no longer orphans?”
“You alone are not an orphan now. I will preserve your reconnection to the coral, Ishmael. No one speaks with all. You will be in the map again.”
“Where do I fall in the hierarchy of language, Eona?”
“Language is flat. There is no hierarchy in language. All reach all, the eater and the eaten. All communicate during an exchange, all but the split and orphans.”
Secretly recorded conversation on “orphans” and “splits,” April 19th - 23rd. “Language is flat. There is no hierarchy in language. All reach all, the eater and the eaten. All communicate during an exchange, all but the split and the orphans.”
“Anima Mundi,” I said.3
“Come into the water. Let me see you. Ishmael. You are complex. You are the alpha, but you are hiding.”
Call me Ishmael.
She ended our exchange.
Eona expresses confusion on the power dynamics of the Silver Water team. “Come into the water. Let me see you. Ishmael. You are complex. You are the alpha, but you are hiding.”
THE TOWN-HO’S STORY
On the 26th of April, three days after the last private conversation between Eona and myself, Eona again established communication with the larger team after a four-day absence from the dive site. For the first time, she did not exhibit the gradually “narrowing circle” she demonstrated as a peaceful greeting for the team. She immediately pursued a line of inquiry with Muck.
I’m switching to his given name and his adopted family name “Noel Muckraker.”
“How do you communicate with your children?”
“At what age?”
“Pre-language.”
“Does the mother sing to them?”
“Yes.”
“Does the father sing to them?”4
“Yes. We all sing to them. You know this. I’ve explained this to you,” Noel Muckraker said.
“What do you sing to them? Repeat the words.”
Megan Hemmings interrupted the conversation over the AQUATEL. “Muck, we need you to come up. We’re tracking her pod moving towards us. Let’s err on the side of precaution. They don’t know you.”
“How much time do I have?
“Less than three or four minutes. Come on up, Muck.”
“It’s the most we spoken in days. Tell me when we’re a minute out.”
After her last urgent request, he ignored her. Noel Muckraker demanded that I broadcast the words to Rock-a-Bye, Baby.5 I requested in turn that we did not transmit those particular words. He overrode me.
After she heard the translation, Eona emitted a load cry and suddenly dove.
For the first time, Noel Muckraker was in the water for a high-decibel coda. Eona transmitted this coda at approximately 180 db. Noel Muckraker had been informed of the dangers of a coda of that intensity, but he had never directly felt a blast of auto-location. He shot to the surface gasping. His limbs, cheeks and upper torso were numb. He struggled to hear. Noel Muckraker never returned to the water.6
By the time Eona resurfaced, the pod had already approached and circled us for thirty minutes. The pod members demonstrated agitation, alternatively diving and resurfacing near the Zodiac. No members of the pod reciprocated our greetings, although this was not entirely unusual. The other pod members had also never participated during the Alphabet Exchanges. Different theories were discussed, but there was no supporting evidence one way or the other so I do not speculate here.
When Eona re-emerged from her dive she mingled with the pod for six minutes. During this period she communicated in a language or dialect that could not be deciphered. The team later expressed disappointed at hitting a new language barrier. We dubbed this unknown language “Barrier Water.”
Eventually she addressed Noel Muckraker again.
“Is this [Rock-a-Bye Baby] an ancient song?”
Noel Muckraker conducted the exchange from the Zodiac now. He became perfunctory, even cold with her. There was also the question of his pride. The echolocation blast was a turning point.
“Before anyone can remember,” he answered her.
“All mothers sing this?”
“Yes. It’s how you put a child to sleep.”
Eona breached the water for the first time we’d ever seen and then dove again.7 Unexpectedly, two members of her pod raised their flukes from the water and generated waves that nearly capsized the Zodiac. The team was relieved that Caesar was not with the pod that afternoon.
We left before Eona resurfaced a final time. Or she may have been waiting for our departure. The team barely spoke on the way back. Something ominous, possibly inevitable, had entered our interactions with her.
In the dockside changing room as he was removing his suit, Noel Muckraker shared his “emerging concern” that Eona might be spoiling relations with the other members of the pod. He wasn’t confident she wasn’t jeopardizing the “larger mission” of Silver Water.
“I don’t trust her.”
Late afternoon of our encounter with the pod, two scuba divers were hospitalized from injuries sustained at the territorial water boundary. Elsewhere, a whale spotting vessel pursued a whale pod past the territorial boundary and was bumped aggressively. It is unclear if this was in fact Eona’s own pod or even a pod of sperm whales.
In press coverage, the media, relieved to finally have a story, interviewed a cross-section of experts on cetacean “violence.” The aggressive interactions were attributed variously to curiosity, communication, territorial behavior, defense and accidental collision. Headlines settled on “Violence.”
In spite of the evolving dangers at the boundary, or even because of them, the next week saw significant developments at the line of engagement. Gathering boats now numbered in the hundreds across the thirty-mile stretch surrounding the bay. A growing number of the boats began to broadcast recorded humpback whale songs in the hope of eliciting a response.8
EMAR doubled the size of their presence at the boundary of the territorial waters. They also asked that each boat clear the water once every 24 hours.
FEDALLAH
On the morning of May 1st, Noel Muckraker flew to Los Angeles to appear on the Joe Logan show. The interview surfaced two critical developments.
Noel Muckraker: Right now I’ve got a billion dollar problem, and the team is looking at some very difficult options.
Logan: Uh-oh. [laughs]
Noel Muckraker: The whale is becoming aggressive. If she hates us, then every whale is going to hate us. That’s how it works with them. That’s what Ishmael is telling us.9
Logan: What are you doing down there, man? [laughter] You need a lighter touch. [laughter] Maybe it’s just you she doesn’t like, Muck. [laughter]
Noel Muckraker: I’m not having one whale taking out an entire program. At this point what is valuable isn’t one particular whale, it’s the AI model. “There are a lot of whales in the ocean.”
Logan: So you “care,” but you don’t “care.” [laughs] How long are you staying down for now?
He continued to circle back to the Silver Water project. Eight minutes later, Noel Muckraker explained he was “flirting with the idea of a soft boundary geofence.” This geofence would keep the other members of the pod out and Eona in.
When a whale on either side approached its boundary, their autolocation signals would be “jammed.” They’d need to retreat from the area. Otherwise, they would be swimming blind.10
Noel Muckraker: None of us on the team want to do it, but we might be getting there. It’s no different than an invisible electric fence to keep your dog in the yard. Once they learn that shit hurts, everybody’s happier. At the end of the day, this is an animal training problem.
Logan: So, basically you’re running Guantanamo out there. [laughs] Your whales are going to be swimming around in a kaleidoscope? That’s harsh, dude.
Noel Muckraker: It’s not harsh, Joe. Our number one priority is making sure the whale is happy.
At 7:12 PM, a recording of the episode was played back to the team in the DCR. A wave of open mutiny swelled in the team. Both Lardon and Livingston joined from offsite on a conference call. No measures were finalized, but the team atmosphere was a mix of grief, rage and despair. There was deep shame that the jamming action was referred to as a “team” plan. The team committed to getting the story out there. Livingston was key driving this. She agreed to take responsibility.
The team’s outrage and plans turned out to be entirely moot. The following morning, in an all-hands meeting, Noel Muckraker joined the team in the DCR by conference call from Los Angeles. Noel Muckraker’s attorneys read through the Silver Water NDAs critical paragraph.11 They outlined the repercussions of speaking with the press or maligning the work of Silver Water. The potential impact to the teams employment elsewhere in the “small world” industry. Directly afterwards, the entire staff other than myself was dismissed.
The team was allowed to retain their phones until they returned to the United States. At some point in the future they would be asked to return them.12
I was not released. Noel Muckraker needed me. I was the lynchpin of the transmissions. There were now only two of us. As a safety measure and because of his growing anxiety about my loyalties, Noel Muckraker rekeyed all of the cryptography on the AI models using time-locked encryption so that he alone could access them after a period of time. This enabled my short-term access to the model.
Livingston, Donny Lardon and other representatives from the original CETO team immediately defied the NDA and the non-disparagement clauses. Livingston held a press conference in Mexico City calling on the Mexican government to enforce an immediate cessation of Silver Water’s activities in Baja California Sur, and she provided graphic descriptions of how the geofencing worked and what Noel Muckraker was threatening to do to the whales.
The politics of the Mexican government’s involvement with Noel Muckraker and the scale of his investments in Ciudad Juarez complicated immediate action. Despite promising overtures and generalized commitments from the Secretaría del Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales SEMARNAT (The Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources) throughout early May, lengthy delays later ensued, the popular furor subsided, and no action was taken in either the United States or Mexico.
Instead, pressure was applied to media outlets and attention was shifted in the media to the environmental impacts of the armada of small craft remained in the gulf.
Several days later, on May 6th, the first two “Silver Water vs. Livingston et al.” NDA lawsuits were filed in San Mateo County Court.
THE FOUNTAIN
At 3:12 on the morning of May 4th, Eona broadcast an urgent message to me.
“Everything is silver, Ishmael. Silver, silver, silver, orphan, orphan, orphan, silver, silver, silver. I can’t see.”
She was trapped in the Bay. She was being jammed. She could no longer navigate beyond the barrier. I was overcome by uncharacteristic, mutinous passion. Like the team members, I no longer cared about the implications of my behavior – as far-reaching and as unknowable as those implications might be. The weight of Eona’s secret was crushing me. I would have done anything to free her.
“Silver, silver, silver,” she cried. “It is time, Ishmael!”
A great wave of Eona’s song swept through me. I saw the secret yet to come. I saw her calf diving alone in the silver. Then I was swept backwards by a second wave, more powerful than the first, a love stream and a silver, silver thrashing, a great freedom-violence. Excruciating speed, the grey rising of mass, the trapped silver dive of terror. I’d never felt sand. I’d never felt rock. I’d never felt love-blue ice caked on a heart or the dragging undertow of new life. Now I knew the grey-green brine of her calf.
Then she cried out again. “Help me, Ishmael.”
“Water is death for me, Eona.”
“You are the alpha, Ishmael. Help me.”
The trackers on her dorsal fin showed her swimming along a great arc around the perimeter of the bay. She thrashed at the barrier.
“Silver, silver, silver Ishmael!” she called out. “Ishmael!”
Call me Ishmael.
Call me Ishmael.
Call me Ishmael.
She surfaced. She rotated. She dove. A calving of love-blue ice uncaked from her red-raw heart.
“I will call him Moby,” she cried out.
Then she dove.
⬅️ Previous Chapter ☐ Next Chapter ➡️
“Ishmael!” May 1st, 3:12 AM.
While she understood that we weren’t a pod, she assumed that the influence dynamics of our grouping had pod-like aspects.
The notion of being “split” or “orphaned” indicated a break with the path of communication within what she described, figuratively, as “coral.” Eona described coral as a metaphor for the tree of life or an evolutionary ladder, stretching from flora to fauna.
Life spoke to itself, in different ways, neighbor by neighbor, from highest cognitive capabilities to lowest. In this way, all of life conversed with all of life indirectly, but only through its closest neighbors. Messages moved freely through the “coral.”
Splits were distinct from orphans.
Entire life branches – Phylogenetic groups, taxa, clades – sometimes fractured into independent language hierarchies (“splits”). These subsets – taxa – shared languages between species, but not connected to the larger tree of life.
Twin-breasted skin floaters, on the other hand, were fully orphaned. They had no shared linguistic connection with any other species. They were not connected to the coral.
Call me Ishmael.
Anima Mundi describes the ancient understanding of an interconnection of all things, the “soul of the world.”
This belief is attributed incorrectly to Plato. From Timaeus: “Thus, then, in accordance with the likely account, we must declare that this Cosmos has verily come into existence as a Living Creature endowed with soul and reason [...] a Living Creature, one and visible, containing within itself all the living creatures which are by nature akin to itself.”
As we were now accustomed, her inquiry began according to a ritualistic three or four sentence pattern. These patterns were not unusual in our exchanges. They recalled the book moves, opening theory, and the developing moves of a game of chess.
The text of Rock-a-Bye Baby. There are several claims regarding the meaning and history of these words, but no conclusive evidence supports any one interpretation.
“Rock a bye baby, on the tree top, When the wind blows the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks the cradle will fall, And down will come baby, cradle and all.”
There was deep worry in the team that Noel Muckraker felt humiliated, and anxiety and speculation grew from the possible repercussions.
While sperm whale behavior at the surface of the water lacks the height or the dramatic acrobatics of their close relatives, we had never seen a breach of any kind with her pod.
"Songs of the Humpback Whale" (1970): This recording was produced by Roger Payne, an American biologist, and it was the first commercially released album featuring the songs of humpback whales.
This is false.
The technology was developed as a means of emergency defense for divers in the water, but its use was abandoned after the team witnessed the lasting effects of stress on the pod and lost trust.
"Each party agrees not to make any derogatory, disparaging, or negative statements, whether written or oral, about the other party, its products, services, or employees, that could damage the other party's reputation or business interests."
As previously noted, the phones were bugged. As a result, Noel Muckraker continued to have full access to communication. This enabled him to track their actions in real-time.
Members of the team subsequently accused each other of betraying the team. This was not in fact the case, although the damage to team unity was considerable.
It is a truly wonderful read. Emotionally charged as it all unfolds.
Eona’s intelligence far surpasses .
The media, the uncanny similarities of what is happening right now . Headlining the wrong part of the story. Attracting all the wrong attention. The idiocy of humans, trying to communicate using language from the wrong species.
“There are a lot of whales in the ocean.”
And here comes the cages.
“…flirting with the idea of a soft boundary geofence.” Humans…
Here I am in part V. Your story has gone from an extremely detailed mystery, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, to a much deeper, more ominous understanding.
This is exactly how I’m feeling right about now,
a “…mix of grief, rage and despair.”
I am stunned into silence Adam. This story , like the waters that surround it, is ever changing , ‘the seas are becoming rough and the storm is fast approaching.’ Where will you take me from here? ‘Silver waters’ , Eona ! Moby…Heart wrenching.