The Astronaut and the Marine Biologist

The swirling colors on the lava lamp captivated the fish inside their clean tank. Blue and lavender were fusing and dividing in little tear drops as the lamp made a delicate bubbling sound. It was another boring day at Wink Headquarters. Shauna wish that she was making up the name, but unfortunately, she wasn’t. The name had been created by Harry Wink, a man who loved money more than his own children. Then again, that could have been a rumor. The rumor mill had all sorts of gossip. Everything you heard about ranged from seamen seeking vengeance at night or smoky sirens disguising their selves as modern day women to beguile naïve visitors. That never stopped Shauna from doing what she loved though. She still had a twinkle in her eye the day her father took her to the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. Seeing those wonderful seals was something that made her heart almost burst out of her chest. Deep down, she always knew that she was going to travel the world and see phenomenal oceans.

Thankfully, she still Facetimed with her friends, Ally, Riley, and Jacob, from Mystic, Connecticut. They had stayed behind to graduate with law degrees from Connecticut College in Groton, CT. While dealing with frustrating clients wasn’t their ideal jobs, they loved the fact that their best friend was living her dream career.

Ally was usually in charge of being a DJ.

Every Wednesday at 5 p.m., they would have their weekly Sea Hangout. Everyone would greet each other with genuine affection. Sometimes the conversation would range from how their jobs were to gushing over Shauna being the most accomplished out of all of them. Shauna sometimes was modest about it. But deep down, she really loved the attention.

On Wednesday, July 14, 2018, Riley had asked her “How do you stay so confident?” The friend squad loved to joke that he was the “fun one.”

Sipping her ginseng tea, Shauna replied, “It’s all about owning your character. You can’t let anyone else write your story.”

“If only more women were like you.” She nudged her shoulder in a playful manner.

Shauna smirked at herself. She even had a perfect life with her astronaut boyfriend, Jason. Despite the fact that she was on land and he was in space, they managed to make the long distance relationship work. Space may have been special, but nothing could top her love for the ocean. Plus, Shauna would never admit this to Jason, but she preferred gravity to the space. Every sci-fi movie she saw about space was either tragic, scary, or both. Needless to say, she would rather feel the pain of sand than the endless void of space itself.

Suddenly, her cell phone rang. “Hello?”

“Bunny, how are you?”

Shauna giggled. Jason always loved calling her by her nickname. “I’m doing well, just dissecting the membrane of our average fish.”

“That’s fascinating. I’m currently in space right now seeing our vast planet Earth.”

“Of course you are.”

“You know you could come with me.”

“Jason, I’m not going to space with you. Have you seen movies about space? There’s always a disaster arising from the vast area.”

“And yet, your idiotic boyfriend is exploring the space.” Jason was only saying this half-jokingly.

“Okay, I got to go. Love you.”

“Love you more.”

“I don’t want you to go to space, Jason.”

“Oh Shauna, you know I love you.”

She turned around and noticed her smart ass friends. She felt so much love for them. It felt like deja vu. Maybe they all knew each other in another life.

Or perhaps, it was just her imagination convincing her it was deja vu.

Jason didn’t know this yet, but he was about to experience some deja vu himself.

Shauna decided that she had enough of staring at a computer screen. She always looked forward to lying down on her blue and green beach towel. She even had sunscreen by her side to protect her from the harmful UV rays.

Maybe walking on the beaches of Cape Cod will lift my spirits up, she thought. A rumbling occurred under her body. The Jeeps that drove on always made Shauna feel vibrations. There was just one problem, though: there was a spaceship right out on Cape Cod beach. How was that even possible? Why would a spaceship be around if Jeeps usually drove by every single day? She could see the man that was vacated inside of his seat has sandy blond hair and faint blue eyes. She always had a weakness for any man with blue eyes. That’s when she realized it wasn’t just any man. It was her boyfriend, Jason Earl Victor, back from outer space.

Shauna had only experienced one other love before she met Jason. His name was Tyler Max Christian. While their break-up wasn’t filled with drama, his two sisters did accuse her of leading him on, even though that wasn’t true at all.

She slowly walked up to him.

“Jason!” “Shauna!” The two companions skipped towards each other like the end to a clichèd montage of a rom-com. Suddenly, Jason growled as he was stun with a taser. “Jason! What’s happening?”

Two fishes walked out of the Cape Cod ocean. Shauna started hyperventilating. Then her other friends saw her. She was able to speak to them.

" What is the meaning of this and why the fuck are there two fish walking like humans?” Ally was the only one who asked this justified question.

“Jason Victor is under arrest for an interracial relationship with a mermaid.”

Shauna’s friends were stunned. “That’s bullshit. Shauna is completely human.” Riley added.

“Besides, she doesn’t even have scales. She has feet like the average human being.”

One of the guards was groaning loudly. “Guess we’ll have to do this the hard way.”

Suddenly, the guard took out a tube of water and splashed it onto Shauna’s legs.

Her mermaid tail was revealed to all of her shocked friends.

hauna was heavily crying. Her soulmate was out of her grasp. She knew it was trivial, but it was just the way she coped with her emotions. She will always be a hopeless romantic. Ally walked into the marine biology office. It was covered with posters of sea life, from the otters and dolphins to the seagulls pooping on tourists. “Don’t worry, Shauna. We’ll get Jason back.”

Shauna wiped away her tears and glanced at Ally. “How are you so calm, Ally? You just found out your best friend is a mermaid?”

“Yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. When do you become a mermaid?”

“Mermaids usually appear human in the day time. But at 5:30 PM, we end up having tails.” “Why 5:30 PM?” Ally asked.

“Nobody knows. Some say it’s that time because of when Atlantis sank underwater. Others believe it’s due to the Oracle underwater deciding to end the war between humans and … You know the rest.”

“That sounds heavy.” Riley popped in. She was chewing bubble gum and rocking her punk look with her black nail polish.

“I concur.”

“Riley, Jacob. What are you doing here?”

“We are both here to save your astronaut boyfriend.” Shauna was confused and touched at once. “But what about your jobs as lawyers? Your jobs will be rescinded.”

“We can build you a rocket. " Ally put her hands up. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but which one of you dorks has a degree in astronomy?”

“My brother, David does.” Replied Riley.

“I was being facetious guys.”

Everyone groaned. Ally always had to be the one to end up being a party-pooper. Don’t confuse her girly nature as naivete. She graduated top of her class in Yale and dropped out to become a marine biologist like Shauna.

“But seriously, we can’t just build a rocket out of thin air. We need professional scientists to help us out.”

“I can help you guys out.”

Suddenly, the gang turned around and saw a Steve Carell lookalike coming towards their way. The only difference was that he had a beard and wore no shirt with khaki shorts.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Doctor Connor Evans. I’m an astrophysicist that specializes in the physics of astronomy. My friends and I can get your buddy back, but it would take a long and arduous time. Do you know what forces are in a rocket?”

Everyone shrugged.

“Forces are vector quantities having both a magnitude and a direction. When describing the action of forces, one must account for both the magnitude and the direction. In flight, a rocket is subjected to four forces; weight, thrust, and the aerodynamic forces, lift and drag. The magnitude of the weight depends on the mass of all of the parts of the rocket.”

“Could you translate that into English please?”

“Certainly. The heavier the rocket, the more likely it can go into space.”

Shauna stopped her melodramatic crying. “Are you saying that to get my boyfriend back, we have to go all the way to outer space?”

“Precisely.”

The whole gang was silent.

“Do you know where my boyfriend is being held?”

“Yes, he’s on the planet called Usurpia. It’s near Uranus and Jupiter.”

“Damn it! I swore that I would never go back to that place.” Shauna kicked the sand angrily.

“Shauna, calm down!” Alia held onto her arms to maintain the peace.

“What happened in Usurpia? Why don’t you want to return there?”

Shauna didn’t reply to this astrophysicist’s questions. The memories of having her mermaid tail whipped was traumatic, the Usurpians’ glares at her were unacceptable, and the

“To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t want to talk about it.”

And that was the moment everyone stayed in silent for about an hour. Two of Shauna’s friends walked back to the marine biologist’s office, while Shauna depressingly looked towards the ocean. She would never see Jason again.

Jason saw his clone right in front of him.

“Who are you?”

“I’m you, an AI version of you.”

“What the fuck? How can you be my AI clone? I thought there was only one of me.”

“The agents at Usurpia took a fragment of your fingernails to make a copy of us. There wasn’t much else we could do to gather more of your DNA, but we were able to get 100% of your human identity.”

Jason’s thoughts warped inside of his brain. He had heard rumors of NASA using astronauts against their will to give up parts of their DNA, but he thought it was all preposterous. He paced back and forth inside of the Tiger rocket ship, or at least, gravitated towards space as gravity made his feet get off of the ground.

“Are we supposed to be twins? Is that why I was cloned?”

“No. They chose you—us—because you had the best genetic material out there. That will give us artificial intelligence, athleticism, and romance.”

Jason was speechless. He couldn’t deny that this was impressive, but he was also taken aback by this robot. His heartbeat beated rapidly, along with his blinking. “Do you need a minute?” asked the clone.

“Yes. Probably 15.”

“Take your time.”

***

Later, Jason and the clone were still having a conversation. They didn’t have to worry about anyone busting inside their room given the fact that everyone was preoccupied with growing crops on another planet. He still missed Shauna with all of his heart, but he’ll be damned if anyone laid a finger on her. If that happened, he would rather go to jail than have her harmed.

“So I was chosen to populate the Earth? What about my girlfriend?”

“They viewed her as an inferior species. They shut down that idea of procreating immediately.”

“Well, to hell with them. I’m going to go back to my girlfriend if it’s the last thing I do.”