From the Sea

The end of Humanity came about in a most peculiar way, and from a place that not many people expected. Most folks believed that a nuclear war would destroy us all, or that some horrifying space terror would visit us, and remove us from the planet.

And yet, the end came not from space or a missile silo, but from the sea.

In mid-march a man and woman were combing the beach for shells came across the beached hulk of a fishing ship. It was a large commercial ship, had suffered massive structural damage. Crawling over the ship the couple made a rather gruesome discovery. The entire crew of the ship had been tied up in their own fishing nets, and been bashed repeatedly by some blunt object. All were dead. Scratched on the deck was the word "REVENGE."

The incident was reported, and at first pirates or a rather malevolent business rival were thought to be the culprits. But then another ship turned up farther up the coast. And then another. And another. Soon reports came in from all around the world of fisherman found dead, caught in their own nets and beaten with a savage fierceness.

And all the ships had "revenge" carved into the deck, or the side of the hull. And it was always in the language in which the ship originated from. The fishing industry ground to a halt, and the Coast Guard was called in to escort the ships out of their harbors. And for a while the attacks stopped.

A few months passed, and the fishing ships started venturing out again. Nothing happened. Soon the summer rolled 'round, and the waters seemed safe for the fisherman again. And then the swimmers started disappearing.

Once again people suspected nothing out of the ordinary, maybe just an increase in sharks, but once the numbers of bathers disappearing reached as high as two-dozen in a week in some places, people began to worry. Even on crowded beaches the swimmers would vanish without a trace. Beaches were declared unsafe, and scientists were called in to investigate the possibility of sharks. But no sharks were ever in the area. But the scientists did notice that an unusual number of dolphins were always around.

People stayed away from the beaches, the disappearances stopped, and everything returned back to normal once again.

Then on August 1st a young fisherman was just heading out into Chesapeake Bay when his boat hit something. He peered over the edge of his boat. It was a human body. He stared. For ahead of him were dozens of bodies, all of them the missing swimmers. He screamed.

Major ports all over the world were found to be filled with the dead bodies of beach goers that had gone missing the month before. Anything having to do with the ocean stopped. Research, fishing, shipping, cruise liners, all stopped. Marine biologists were sent in by the dozens, by helicopter, to investigate the possibility of a malignant ocean going life form.

Meanwhile chaos was ruling dry land. A select few were yelling that it was the end of the world, many said it was because we had been polluting the oceans. All agreed that this was a bad sign.

Then the third wave of attacks began to take place. Aquariums all over the world were now the targets. Sea World was the first. At 10 am, John Hammond went to the dolphin tank to feed them. He was never seen again. When somebody went to the dolphin tank to find him they found the dolphin tank devoid of dolphins.

It began to happen all over the world, dolphins were being freed from their prisons. And suddenly ever thing clicked together. It was the dolphins. They were seeking revenge against humanity, for the tuna net incidents, for being forced to do shows for people every day at 1:05, 2:05, and 3:35.

And so began the slaughter. At first it was just angry civilians, charging out in motor bots, shooting at anything that moved. Then the military started stringing up massive nets. People were encouraged to fish for dolphins. And the attacks began to step up. The dolphins began to use old torpedoes from sunken warships against the navies of the world.

And so the humans steeped up their attack against the dolphins. The dolphins were killed by the thousands every day, and yet they still destroyed our ships by the hundreds in return.

And then, one dark day, Miami blew up. The dolphins had harnessed nuclear weapons using old nuclear reactors. The world reacted violently. A virus was released into the waters specifically designed to wipe out dolphins.

The last of the dolphins had been wiped out, and the attacks had stopped. Most of the coastal cities had been wiped out, but the war had been won. Meanwhile as the world mourned its losses, a scientist by the name of Tom Hargrove had finally finished analyzing all his data. He had been studying the migratory patterns of tuna for years, and he noticed something puzzling. The tuna had vacated areas where they normally gathered. Fisherman were having more and more trouble over the years finding them. At first it had been thought that they were simply over fished, but now it looked as though they were actively avoiding the fisherman.

At least that was what Hargrove thought. No one else subscribed to this particular theory. Tuna were not known for their intelligence. But as he gathered more and more data he began to get worried. The tuna were gathering in large groups they weren't known to inhabit. And tuna he had tagged had all shown up at sites that had been heavily attacked by the dolphins. And now they were gathering around the north and south poles. Which didn't make sense.

And then it hit him.

"The tuna! The tuna are going to kill us all!" he ran into the streets screaming.

And no one listened.

And the tuna killed them all. The tuna had been the ones all along. Framing the dolphins, so they could put their master plan into effect. To melt the polar ice caps, and flood the world.

Which is what they did. They planted the last of their nuclear weapons around the ice caps, and detonated them all at the same time. The ocean levels rose dramatically, sweeping over the continents, wiping out even more cities. The cloud that rose from the explosions then created a nuclear winter, creating a new ice age. The tuna didn't care though. They had won, and were used to the cold.

And that's how humanity ended. Because of tuna.

Really.