Jellyfish Dream of Empire

The jellyfish know something we don't, or so I feel, watching them sixteen minutes to five. “Nature's perfect metronomes,” my mother called them, fogging the aquarium glass as we huddled together during our weekly vigil. Even then, she moved between worlds—scientist cataloging their prehistoric decorum, soothsayer reading prophecies in their pulse. “No thinking, no feeling, just rhythm. Makes you wonder what they’re counting down to,” she’d say, her laugh like wind through empty rooms. Even as the cancer took hold, that laugh remained, though it took on the quality of waves on the horizon.

I count the jellyfish: one, four, seven, thirteen. The numbers slip away like water between my fingers—like the faces of the children I sometimes glimpse through slits in the reinforced windows of our vertical cities. Their undersized palms press against the glass, leaving ghosts of heat and hope. I count because I need control. I need control because I’m afraid. And I’m afraid because of love—love for the millions who traded earth for sky on my promise of salvation, who sleep in pods I built resembling the vertebrae of a spine stretching endlessly upward, piercing the clouds.

These crystalline bodies appeared in my home aquarium two weeks ago as if waiting for the right moment to materialize. "They’re not real. Just quantum decoherence in your visual cortex, Minister Ong." the investigators state, tapping their temples where neural implants cast a faint jade glow beneath the skin. Standard issue for new world bureaucrats who’ve never known the sting of salty air, never felt rising waves tug at their ankles. But they never looked directly at the tanks, as if afraid they too might start seeing jellyfish stare back, might recognize in the water they displace the shape of all we've lost.

In those kinder times before the waters claimed Singapore, my mother and I would press our foreheads against the glass until our worlds blurred. We’d trace the jellyfish’s paths with our eyes as if decoding their strange arithmetic of survival. Each visit, she’d bring a new observation to the forefront. “See how still they are,” she’d remark softly. “It’s not weakness—it’s patience. They let the current carry them somewhere new.” Or “They leave no trace, no wake. There’s strength in knowing when to yield." Maybe the aquarium taught lessons I was too stubborn to hear. I wish I had asked, though it wouldn't have mattered then. I was naive, drunk on messianic dreams, believing I was chosen to lead my people above the waters. Now I understand that while we were watching them, the jellyfish were watching us, warning us how glass walls, no matter how thick, still trap more than they protect.

Time showed patience while I raced against it. I thought I had learned all I could from its uncompromising procession, but watching these creatures perform, I’ve learned time isn’t meant to be counted by minutes or seconds but rather by the choreography of consequence. It flows like water. Each slight movement manifests destiny, narrowing paths until only one remains. Tonight, however, the calculus of destiny took on a lethal certainty.

“Minister,” Lyra, my AI operating partner, interrupts, her voice bearing the particular harmonic reserved for imminent danger, “there’s been another breach on Level 44.” The same level I used to house freshwater depots for the first few waves of refugees. 

"Yes, yes, I sense them." I cup my hands against the glass, trading my presence for another. I watch the jellyfish glide between seaweed stalks as I tune the sirens out. “Dim the lights.”

The jellyfish swell into living constellations, continuing their slow ballet in the dark. Some nights, I’d watch them until dawn, hypnotized by the liquid calculations their shadows cast on walls. They moved like the controlled burns I once orchestrated on land-bound farms in my youth. "Fire cleanses," my father used to say, "so new things can grow." Back then, I believed fire was the purest agent of change—violent, immediate, and final. I’d stand transfixed, watching it tear across fields. As I watch these gentle creatures, I understand how incomplete that vision was. Fire only knows consumption, while jellyfish understand that not all renewals need to leave ash in their wake.

Such bitter knowledge. Through their translucence, I can make out the blurry silhouettes of my empire’s holdings—a forest of pin-like structures I'd designed in my younger, idealistic days. Back when I still believed a new world could be built from concrete and glass alone. Each tower rose from the drowned world like a prayer answered wrong; their ghostlike spines reflecting light where hope met surrender. 

I imagine myself lying down to rest, each needle meaningless on its own yet working together to support my body’s dead weight—much like the millions who now dwell in my ascendent sanctuaries, their combined faith in me both crown and anchor. I built these towers to save them from the rising waters, never questioning if some things were meant to be submerged, transformed rather than preserved.

My heart slows in sync with the room, but my temples hum with data—defense systems activating, security protocols engaging. All pointless. I had built such elaborate cages for protection, never realizing that the bars were merely shadows of my fingers, stretched long by artificial light.

Behind me, the door whispers open. The assassin and I stand still until I laugh—a sound like drowning. "There's a theory," I posit to the presence I can’t bring myself to face, "about quantum immortality. In every moment where death is possible, consciousness splits. We only experience the paths where we survive.” I wait, remembering how my mother once explained how jellyfish revert to a juvenile form when under pressure, achieving a sort of immortality through transformation rather than preservation. “Do you think somewhere we found the right path, or are we trapped in the timeline where we can't escape what we've become?”

The silence holds the weight of consideration. “Perhaps we're all living in the wrong branch.” The voice is my mother’s, of course. It was always going to be her. In every timeline, in every possible world, she was always the one to teach me this final lesson about letting go. 

I watch a jellyfish drift past my reflection, its translucent body refracting my features into something almost forgivable. “Or maybe just the most honest one.”

“They say honest men don't build empires,” she says.

“And honest men don't hesitate to tear them down.” I retort as I press my forehead against the icy glass. “Yet here we are."

I wait for release. For a bullet to finally answer all my ledgers. My reflection flickers in the glass before me, hesitating between solid and translucent, like the jellyfish on the other side. Like truth. Fear tastes like salt water. It has its own rhythm now, like the jellyfish—a pulse that counted down what remained of the man who built glass walls around everything he loved. It had always been about love, hadn't it? What I'd do to protect it, and what I'd become trying to preserve it. The answer stood behind me now, wearing my mother's voice.

In this timeline, I understand that every wall is temporary, but water—water remembers all the shapes it's held. I turn to face her. Below, I continue counting: forty-two, forty-four, forty-nine. No prophecy here. No redemption. Just the mathematics of transformation. Just a mother's final lesson in letting go.

⁍ She doesn't miss.