The sound of a motor broke my reverie.
I shook off my flashback, jumped up off my beach towel, and ran over to the rocky outcroppings where Dylan and I had searched the tidepools.
Dylan drove up as far as he could, then tugged the watercraft the rest of the way. “Hey, Allie,” he said with a grin on his face.
“Hi, Dylan.” For a moment, I pushed aside my suspicions and confusion over his impossible disappearance into the sea for over a week to appear nonchalant.
“I hope all has been well with you.” Dylan’s smile spread like he’d just won a trillion dollars.
Allowing my façade to melt away, I let my annoyance rise to the surface. In a ploy to appear confident, I folded my arms tight across my turquoise bikini top. “So, what happened the last time I saw you? From here on the beach, it looked like you rode straight into the ocean and disappeared. I waited for days to see if you’d resurface, but you never did. Am I losing my mind, or is there something else going on here? If there’s some kind of SCUBA equipment that allows you to…”
Dylan merely kept grinning ecstatically. “I already told you…I live in the ocean in an underwater city called Oceania.”
“No, you didn’t tell me anything. All you did was ask if I was from Oceania. You never said you were from there…and you never said it was an underwater city. You merely implied both of those things.”
Blowing air out through his nostrils and pursing his lips, Dylan responded, “Either way, I thought it was obvious.” Shrugging he added, “Anyway, I brought you something to prove my statement.”
“Like what?” I unfolded my arms to peer over Dylan’s shoulder at the object being wrenched out of his pocket.
Cradled in his left hand was a shiny, black orb, so polished that it shimmered in the direct sunlight. A solitary button lay on the top, which he pressed. The area in between us erupted into a holographic diorama of a city. Lines erupted all over the blue hologram defining the minute details of the image. Color flooded through the achromatic vision to fill out each structure, as the entire hologram rotated in a clockwise direction.
“This is the city of Oceania. It’s where I live at a depth of 12,000 feet beneath the surface.”
Mesmerized by the diagram as I was, I jolted back at his words. “Are you serious?”
“This is why I’m showing you this; I am serious. How and why would I make this up?”
I just stared at him, still trying to assess whether he was crazy or not. But then again, I had seen him dive into the ocean and not return for a week. “How is it that no one on land knows about this city?”
“Up until last week, I didn’t even know there were people on land, but it must be because of its secret construction. About 190 years ago, the world population of twelve billion people was decimated by a virus that wiped out over fifty percent of the global population. Both my world and yours remembered it as The Great Plague of 2083. Scores of people in every major city died within weeks of the outbreak, leaving medical science baffled. For years, it raged on, killing in no particular pattern. Finally, almost a decade after it began, the virus began to quell.
“But by then, governments around the world were worried about a potential resurgence of the virus that could easily wipe out most of the planet, once again devastating the poorest and wealthiest of nations alike. The world was so overpopulated at the time of the plague that the virus spread like wildfire, catching flame in every major city and sending embers into the countryside. Malnutrition due to insufficient food and a clean water supply only added to the problem in developing countries. Every international aid organization had fallen and someone had to do something. The T2N—the Top 20 Nations—along with the rest of the world felt compelled to get together to develop a solution—that solution was Oceania.”
“Where you live?” I stared at him incredulously.
“Yes.” Dylan nodded. “It’s an entire city beneath the ocean.” He gestured to his left, at the line where the horizon met the sea. “It’s right out there.”
I laughed disbelievingly. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Is this some joke? Some play on the lost city of Atlantis. Am I on a prank show?”
“No, Allie.” Dylan took two steps closer to me. “I’m telling you the truth. It was an experiment to see if mankind could survive beneath the sea in a self-sustaining environment. Space was too far away and too complicated to evacuate large masses of people in a hurry, leaving the ocean as the alternative.”
I shook my head again, backing away slowly. He was crazy. Insane!
“Allie, perhaps that is the reason this beach is off limits. No one is allowed to come here because it has the most direct access to Oceania. Oceania was a secret program by the United States in conjunction with the T2N. It took over thirty years to design and another ten years to build. They began working on the designs during the last years of The Great Plague. Finally, it was completed in 2130.”
I stopped backing away. Okay, maybe Dylan was insane, but he really seemed to be thoroughly engrossed in his insanity. He truly believed in this underwater city where people lived to ensure the survival of mankind. Perhaps, the best thing was to placate him by playing along. Besides, there was no one else around for a couple of miles. If Dylan tried to drag me into the sea, no one would hear me scream. Perhaps, it’d be best
