Year 1200 · the world the film opens on
The Drowned World
What a thousand years of rain leaves behind: a salty, empty ocean, a sky with nothing flying in it, people with no fire, eight rocks, and one fixed star.
The sea · decided
The ocean stayed salty
35 ‰ to 29 ‰ over the thousand years. A real stress on marine life, nowhere near an extinction.
This was nearly decided the other way. A fresh-water delivery would take the ocean to about 7 ‰. Human kidneys can handle water that dilute, so a 7 ‰ ocean is nearly drinkable, and that destroys the film’s entire fresh-water economy: the urine-recycling opening, water as currency, all of it.
The film’s scarcity is terrestrial, not marine. People fish successfully throughout. What is scarce is dirt, paper, plants, tobacco, metal and fresh water. A dead ocean is not what the film shows.
It costs nothing to arrange. The feedstock was always salty: the oceans of Europa and Enceladus are saline, and chondritic material carries soluble chlorides and sulfates. A purification plant produces two streams, product water and reject brine. The depot’s discharge specification requires output matched to the receiving body’s composition, so the overflow vents both.
Environmental compliance, followed perfectly, for a thousand years.
The sea · still poor
An empty ocean
Impoverished for better reasons than salt.
- The shelves are gone. Every continental shelf and coastal upwelling zone is under kilometers of water. Essentially all historical fisheries lived there.
- Nothing feeds it. No river nutrients. No desert dust. The steady state is oligotrophic: the Sargasso Sea, globally.
- The deep is dead. Warm, stratified, sluggish circulation leaves the deep permanently anoxic and euxinic.
- Fish have a floor. No fish can live below about 8,200 m. The limit is set by TMAO, the compound fish use to protect their proteins from pressure, and it is hard. Most of the new ocean’s volume is permanently uninhabitable to vertebrates.
The monster
It did not evolve. It came up.
The film’s creature is too complex to have evolved in a thousand years. It was always there, deeper than anyone went.
Size is not the problem. The nutrient pulse of the drowning fed an explosion of life that was over within a century, but a large predator can still find enough to eat. The problem is complexity. Anything that radically different needs far longer than a thousand years to evolve, and a timeline that long would have turned the humans into something else too. In the film, most humans are still human.
So it did not evolve. It relocated. The ocean gained 8 km of depth. Pressure made the old seafloor uninhabitable: it now lies deeper than any fish can live. The warm, stratified water above it lost its oxygen. The habitable ocean collapsed into a thin layer at the top.
The monster was always down there. Nobody had seen it because nobody went that deep, and new species still turn up in the deep sea often enough that this is not a stretch. It is at the surface now because the surface is the only place left with oxygen in it.
It is probably not the only thing that came up. Anything from the deep that can stand the lower pressure could follow it. There could be krakens.
What lives
Survivors and the extinct
The survivors are at home in both salt and fresh water, or live entirely at sea and bear live young. Everything that needs land to breed is gone.
- No. 01 Diadromous fish salmon, eels, sticklebacks, gobies, killifish Already move between fresh and salt water. Persists
- No. 02 Cetaceans Cetacea Fully aquatic. Live birth. Persists
- No. 03 Sirenians Sirenia Fully aquatic. Live birth. Persists
- No. 04 True sea snakes Hydrophiinae Bear live young at sea. Persists
- No. 05 Sargassum Sargassum Free-floating. Reproduces vegetatively. Persists
- No. 06 Sea skaters Halobates The only truly oceanic insects. Wingless. Persists
- No. 07 Seals and sea lions Pinnipedia Breed on land. Extinct
- No. 08 Sea turtles Chelonioidea Nest on beaches. Extinct
- No. 09 Every bird Aves Nest on land. Extinct
Nothing flies anywhere on Earth.
No birds. No bats. No winged insects.
The body · food
No fire
Vitamin C is destroyed by heat. Naval scurvy came from salted, cooked, preserved food, not from the absence of plants.
They have no fire. No wood, no fuel, no safe hearth on a raft. So they cannot cook, so they eat everything raw, which is exactly the diet that prevents scurvy. It is the documented Inuit case.
A low-carbohydrate diet also lowers the requirement, because glucose and vitamin C compete for the same transporter into the cell.
Vitamin C
raw food · per 100 g
- Muktuk, whale skin
- ~36 mg
- Dried seaweed
- 20–40 mg
- Adrenal gland
- among the highest of any tissue
- Brain, liver, kidney, roe
- meaningful amounts
- Raw fish flesh
- a few mg
To prevent scurvy~10 mg a day
One to two kilograms of raw fish a day clears it on flesh alone. Muktuk is comparable to orange juice. Sprouted seed on the atolls helps.
The absence of fire is a catastrophe and the thing that keeps them alive. A people who could cook would have cooked, and died of it.
Scurvy killed the first generations, the ones who still ate like their grandparents. The survivors learned to eat organs raw. It felt like becoming an animal, and its taboos outlive the reason for them.
The organs go to the children. That is the law. It is five hundred years old. Nobody remembers why.
The body · light
What the thin sky did
Cataracts, not cancer
Skin cancer is slow and mostly arrives after people have had their children. UV cataracts blind people in their forties, in a world that requires sight to eat. Chronic immune suppression from UV is the second-largest effect.
Folate, not radiation
UV does not reach a fetus. But folate breaks down in light, UV degrades it, and folate deficiency causes neural tube defects. A diet with no leafy greens or legumes makes it worse. UV is not written here as causing mutations.
A flood-era condition
The ozone recovers within a century of the last delivery. The film takes place after that.
Two things that stay normal
Air and sun
What dooms them
The materials trap
Every human technology is downstream of terrestrial materials. Salvage is a finite, corroding inheritance: structural steel in seawater has a few centuries in it at most.
Inventory · Year 1200
- Ore
- None
- Wood
- None
- Fiber
- None
- Clay
- None
- Fuel
- None
- Salvage
- Finite. Corroding.
Dry Land
Not one island. Eight.
At +8,150 m these summits are still out of the water, drawn to scale by how far each one stands above it.
- Everest +699 m
- K2 +461 m
- Kangchenjunga +436 m
- Lhotse +366 m
- Makalu +335 m
- Cho Oyu +38 m · awash
- Dhaulagiri +17 m · awash
- Manaslu +13 m · awash
Everest, Lhotse and Makalu sit within 20 km of each other, a local group. Kangchenjunga is 130 km east. K2 is 1,300 km northwest and carried its own holdout, which went silent in Era VI and became a rumor even to the people who have a rumor.
Only Everest was ever farmed. The seed bank was there. The rest are bare rock. The greenery and animals in the film are the Everest colony’s stock, gone feral. The film’s Dry Land is assumed to be Everest.
The water stops at +8,150 m on purpose. More than one rock is what makes Dry Land a story with no fixed referent in the film.
The Mariner
Where the Mariner comes from
Gills cannot evolve in a thousand years. So somebody made them, and there was one place left that could.
- Given
Evolution cannot do it.
A thousand years is about forty generations. The closest real case, the whales, took roughly ten million years to go from land to sea.
- So
He was made.
That takes a working laboratory, and by the last centuries of the rain there is one left on Earth: the holdout on the Everest massif, with the last working technology anywhere.
- Why
They could do the arithmetic.
They knew the water would stop. Their error bars were wider than the mountain is tall. So in their last two generations they built a successor that would not need the mountain: gill-bearing, salt-tolerant, pressure-adapted. Not a weapon. A successor.
- Then
They sent it out.
One small cohort, released or abandoned around Year 960. The release was a rite of passage: sent out, expected back.
- But
The rain stopped short.
In Year 1000, 700 m below the summit. The mountain did not need a successor after all, and the cohort stayed on the water.
- And
The trait breeds true.
Either it was engineered dominant, or the cohort bred among itself as a small, hated clan. Either way there are few of them.
- So
He is a descendant, not a survivor.
The film’s Mariner is roughly eight generations down from the cohort. No extended lifespan. It would buy nothing once he is a descendant, and a 240-year-old who acts thirty is a bigger stretch than gills.
- Therefore
He does not know what he is.
The cohort was sent out and expected back. He comes back to the mountain in the film without knowing it.
It is still a stretch, and the ledger says so. Giving the holdout a motive rather than a contrivance is what makes it as strong as it can be.
Design brief
The holdout, Everest massif · its last two generations
- Purpose
- Outlive the last mountain
- Not
- A weapon
- Breathes
- Through gills
- Salt water
- Tolerant
- Pressure
- Adapted
- Lifespan
- Unchanged
- Inheritance
- Breeds true
- Cohort
- One, small
- Release
- About Year 960
- Return
- Expected
The atolls
Older atolls are better atolls
Purpose-built floating habitat from the building era, decayed. At the heart of each is an Ancient core, with its buoyancy hull, desalination plant and growing deck, that nobody can open or rebuild. The visible welded junk is five centuries of patching around it. Capability declined across the building era, so the oldest atolls are the best ones. This is the political geography of the film’s world.
From Era V until about Year 1070 the mountain traded with the atolls. Dirt, seed, wood and fiber went down; metal and fish came up. Dirt as the mountain’s export is the origin of the film’s dirt economy.
The atolls knew land existed. They never knew where. The position was the family’s secret, and nobody else could navigate to a fixed point anyway. Contact ended when the materials trap killed the last seaworthy hull, not by decision. Five generations later, land is something a grandmother said her grandfather came from. That is the film’s Gregor and Helen.
The relics
Sealed, anoxic, cold
Paper, cloth and tobacco do not survive a century of open seawater, let alone a thousand years. They come out of sealed, anoxic compartments in drowned structures. That is how deep-wreck organics actually survive, and it is why they are treasure and why a diving trade exists at all.
Navigation
One fixed star
Backed-up cargo is visible overhead as a line or a ring for the whole flood and after. The depot itself is still up there during the film.
Nobody on the water can find a fixed point. There are no charts, no instruments, no training, and atolls drift. A fixed island in an open ocean is unfindable by anyone who cannot navigate, and by Year 1200 nobody can, except one family.
The depot sits in a fixed orbit. It is a fixed mark in the sky, and the family navigates by the thing that drowned the world.
What people call it tracks how much they have lost
- Infrastructure
- A landmark
- A portent
- A god
- Nothing. Just something the Ancients left up there.
Next · the novella
The Line
One family, forty-eight generations, and one sheet of paper that ends as a map.