Jellyfish Dream of Empire

The jellyfish know something we don't. At least, that’s how I feel, watching them sixteen minutes before five on a Tuesday evening. “Nature’s perfect metronomes,” my mother called them, half-scientist, half-soothsayer. “No thinking, no feeling, just rhythm. Makes you wonder what they’re counting down to,” she’d remark with a chuckle. Even in sickness, she’d still laugh then, back when we had more to laugh about.

I count the jellyfish obsessively: one, four, seven, thirteen, though the numbers slipped away like water between my fingers. I count because I need control. I need control because I’m afraid. And I’m afraid because of love—love for the millions of my countrymen who traded earth for sky on my promise of salvation.

These congregations of crystalline bodies began appearing in my home aquarium fourteen days ago as if they'd been waiting all along for the right moment to materialize. "Just quantum decoherence in your visual cortex, Minister Ong. They’re not real." the investigators say, tapping their temples where neural implants cast a faint jade glow beneath the skin—standard issue for bureaucrats of the new world who’d never known the sting of salty air. But they never looked directly at the tanks as if afraid they, too, might start seeing jellyfish stare back. 

In those kinder times, my mother and I spent hours watching them navigate through manufactured seas, our weekly ritual. In those last days before Singapore’s drowning, we’d press our foreheads against the glass, anticipating their paths with our eyes as if decoding their strange arithmetic of survival. Maybe the aquarium was her way of silently teaching me lessons I was too stubborn to hear. Part of me wishes I had asked, but another part of me knows it wouldn’t have mattered at least not 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. Perhaps that’s what my mother was trying to teach me.

Time has been patient with me, even as I raced against it. I thought I had learned all I could from its uncompromising procession, but watching these creatures perform each evening, I’ve come to understand that 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 assistant, interrupts, her voice bearing the particular harmonic reserved for imminent danger, “there’s been another breach on Level 44.”

"Yes, yes, I sense them." I cup my hands against the glass, fading my reflection, watching 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, watching it tear across fields with the same transfixation I now hold for these gentle creatures. But fire only knows consumption, while jellyfish understand that not all renewals need to leave ash in its wake.

Such bitter wisdom. Through their translucence, I can make out the blurry silhouettes of my empire’s holdings—a forest of impossibly tall, thin structures I'd designed in my younger, more 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 artificial light, existing where hope met compromise, survival 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 incessantly with incoming 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. For a time, the assassin and I stand still, neither daring to make a move until finally, I laugh—a sound like drowning. "There's a theory," I say 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. “Do you think somewhere we found the right path while we're trapped here in the timeline where neither of us can 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.

“Wrong,” I muse. I watch a jellyfish drift past my reflection, its translucent body refracting my features into something almost forgivable. “Or 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. Truth be told, I was afraid. The thought tastes like salt water. Fear 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 at last 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 what lives and what transforms.

⁍ She doesn't miss.

‍

—

Drawing inspiration from my stay in Singapore and the insightful conversations I had there on climate and politics.