Chapter 3

THREE

Saturday, December 18, 7:03 A.M. CST

Bailey’s Key

Eva enjoyed

the feel of the air rushing past her as she kayaked across to Bailey’s Key. She no longer took the boat taxi across the channel from the main island, but kayaked three days a week and swam the other two. It was great exercise, and an even better way to clear her mind and get ready for the work of the day.

Over the past several months, she’d been cross-matching the signature whistles of Taffy and Cleo with those of the other dolphins. And although variations abounded, similar to the variations in different human languages and dialects, her focus was on finding the universals in dolphin communication patterns. Universals that humans could use to speak the dolphins’ own language.

The basic building block of cetacean communication was the whistle. In most cases, whistles were nouns, but they could also stand for adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. Eva still remembered her breakthrough eight months ago when she identified the whistle for

different

. Because dolphins were easily stimulated and vocalized quite a bit, it was hard to pick out specific meanings when it came to adjectives and adverbs. Nouns were easy; you showed the dolphin an object, and they named the object. Adjectives required understanding more subtle differences, and seeing things in the way dolphins did. Every adjective she identified was gold.

Of course, dolphins also communicated with echolocation. Dolphins could “see” things by sending out echolocation click trains that returned to the dolphin, changed. Dolphins could then mimic these returning sound patterns and send them to each other—essentially broadcasting a perfect image of what they had “seen.” These weren’t so much words, but pictures. Perfect pictures. And with Eva’s software, she was gradually learning to speak this language too.

As she pulled up alongside the dock at Bailey’s Key, a teenage boy called out to her. “Eva, I’m back!”

Eva looked up to see Leo running over. The boy looked like he had grown at least six inches since she’d seen him last. He’d been back in Milan with his family for the school year. She pulled herself up onto the dock and gave him a great big hug.

“Leo, it’s good to see you. I didn’t think you’d be back until summer.”

Leo grinned. “I talked my mom into bringing us for Christmas break. I’ve upgraded all my equipment, too—so if there’s anything you need me to track, or film…”

Leo and his drones had proven immensely useful to Eva earlier in the year, during their search for the elusive sea creature known as the Lusca.

“Actually, if you’re free, Cleo and I are going to practice hunting for lionfish together. It would be great if you could get some footage.”

“You got it, Dr. Eva. Though lionfish seem kind of tame after hunting the Lusca.”

Eva laughed. “I think I’ve had enough of sea dragons, Leo. At this point I’m ready for ‘tame.’”

Eva checked in with Jose and Axel, who had already set up her equipment. Ranger Oliver Sterling, the man who’d established the lionfish spear hunt certification program, was there as well. At his feet was a bubbling cooler with a battery-powered aerator.

Eva nodded to the cooler. “What do we have today, Ranger?”

“A giant cat,” said Oliver. “It’s survived many derbies, so it should be a crafty one. Go ahead, take a look.”

Eva opened the cooler to reveal a large lionfish with red and white zebra stripes.

Lionfish were invasive to the Caribbean, and damaging to the local ecosystem; they ate the fish that kept the reef healthy, such as the parrotfish, which fed on the algae that would otherwise overgrow on the coral and kill it. They also lacked natural predators, which meant human divers were responsible for keeping the lionfish population under control. Thanks to people like Ranger Sterling, locals and tourists alike were recruited to cull their numbers.

Eva donned thick dive gloves to protect herself from the lionfish’s venomous spiky fins, then carefully placed it in Cleo’s view-box. Cleo swam around excitedly and wiggled her body back and forth.

Does Cleo see this as work or play?

Eva wondered.

Or does she even make the distinction?

Eva made the hand signal for

vocalize

while saying, “Vocalize.” She repeated the command once more, and Axel recorded Cleo’s whistle.

Eva had presented lionfish to the dolphins many times, and had a full library of the resulting whistles, from both Taffy and Cleo, and even Finn. But it was necessary to be sure this lionfish would be referred to in the same way as the others.

Axel removed his headphones. “It sounds like a match. What do you think, Jose?”

Jose stood at the monitor, rocking back and forth, analyzing the spectrogram. “Cleo whistle. Match. Taffy whistle.”

Axel and Jose were both gifted when it came to sounds. Axel had won an international

Name That Tune

competition, and Jose had a savant-like ability to recognize the patterns of sound waves.

Axel then fitted Eva with a waterproof earpiece, so he could communicate with her in the water, and Eva gave her team last-minute instructions.

“Wait until I’m in the water to let the lionfish go. Jose, release the fish by the rocks so it has plenty of places to hide. Axel, don’t play any whistle files until I’m in the water.” She remembered Leo. “Oh, and Leo, go ahead and launch that drone.”

Eva then grabbed her snorkel gear, dive lantern, and her Roatán Marine Park engraved Hawaiian sling from her storage closet in her new office, then stripped down to her suit, leaving her shorts and T-shirt on a rock in the sun to stay warm, before entering the water.

Cleo, excited to get to work, splashed Eva while she donned her mask and fins. Oliver was already geared up and in the water. When Eva signaled that she was ready, Jose let the lionfish loose by the reef rocks, and Axel played two dolphin signature whistles over the hydrophone in the water—the equivalent of the words “where” and “lionfish,” which was meant to sound to Cleo something like: “Where’s the lionfish?”

Cleo immediately swam over to the reef rocks, with Eva close behind her. The lionfish was nowhere to be seen; it had likely hidden in one of the many small caves in the rock. Cleo sent out an echolocation click train, then paused for a fraction of a second before emitting a signature whistle.

Seconds later, Axel translated Cleo’s communication to Eva through her earpiece: “It’s to your right.”

Eva spotted a small cave at the base of the rock to her right. She readied her sling, which was just a large slingshot, and let out a breath so that she would sink to the sandy bottom of the enclosure. Then she flicked on her dive lantern.

Sure enough, the large crafty lionfish was right where Cleo had said it would be. Eva moved in closer, preparing for the kill. She let the sling fly. It hit her target.

First try

.

She pulled the sling back and gently pushed herself off the reef rock with two fingers. She floated to the surface, where Cleo and Oliver joined her. The young dolphin sent out multiple squeaks and whistles, bobbing her head up and down as if she was praising Eva for following directions well.

Eva smiled. “We did it, girl. We did it!”

Oliver spit out his snorkel. “Well done, Dr. Paz. Quite a proof of concept. Cleo thinks you passed. I must agree.”

Eva had spent years giving dolphins commands, asking them to follow instructions. But this was new: humans being able to follow

dolphin

commands. Working together, Eva knew that humans and dolphins could accomplish great things.

As Eva got out of the water and towel-dried her hair, Rascal ran over to her and barked. Eva motioned with her hand to the small sandy shore on Bailey’s Key. “Rascal, go play with Finn. Go on now! Get around to the beach.”

Rascal wagged his tail and ran down the dock to meet Finn in the shallow waters off the beach. The dog had learned that he needed to ask permission, and that he could only play with the dolphins when Eva’s team wasn’t busy with research. So every time she got out of the water, he barked his request.

Eva picked up a pair of scissors and cut the venomous spines off the lionfish, then tossed the prize to Cleo, who swallowed it in one gulp.

Eva sighed. “Cleo getting to direct me is going to be great fun until she realizes I can’t see with sound too—that I have to have a translator for her echo mimicry clicks.”

Given the three-dimensional world dolphins inhabited and their echolocation abilities, Eva’s big breakthrough earlier in the year had been discovering that their language was image-based. Dolphins could see with sound and share these images with each other. The linguistics community had already coined the idea of environment determining language as the

Paz Theory

, and optimists had latched on to it in a rather out-of-context sort of way. Eva didn’t think understanding language on this level could lead to world peace, but it was certainly a beginning.

“

Ja

, but we got to start somewhere, boss,” Axel said, echoing her thoughts as he started sorting the day’s recordings into the Delphi Imago library.

Leo came over to her. “I got some awesome footage. I even captured the whistles.”

Eva smiled. Leo’s drone footage would be fun to watch. She took a seat on a rock and gestured for him to sit down next to her.

“All right then,” she said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”