Chapter 1. Rotten Water
The air in the port of Tual was thick enough to chew; it was sticky and smelled as if the ocean itself had died and was slowly decomposing in the scorching sun. It smelled of diesel, burnt oil from street woks, and that sickly-sweet, nauseating stench that rises when you slice open the belly of an old fish.
Isak sat on the edge of the concrete pier, his legs dangling over the black, oily water, smoking a Gudang Garam. The cheap kretek crackled with burning cloves, shooting sparks, and its spicy smoke was the only thing keeping the nausea at bay.
"Empty," Rahmat's voice sounded like a verdict.
The old man climbed out of his boat, his bare, calloused feet stepping heavily onto the slime-covered steps. His face, resembling a crumpled sheet of brown paper, betrayed nothing. In these parts, people didn't like to spend emotions; emotions burned calories, and calories cost money.
"Completely?" Isak didn't turn around. He was staring at the water, which was too calm. Lifeless.
No crabs, no small fry, not even garbage. Rahmat spat red betel saliva into the water; the spit didn't disperse but lay on the surface like a maroon blot.
"The water has gone 'dead', Isak. The Banda Sea has closed up shop."
Isak knew the old man was right. For a week now, Tual had been living in a strange, feverish state. First, the catch disappeared. Fishermen returned with empty eyes and empty nets, muttering something about "cold currents." Then the military flooded the town. Guys in camouflage with Jakarta patches cordoned off the beaches, set up checkpoints on the roads to the coast, and, most ridiculously, tried to chase the locals off the piers.
"But chasing locals is like trying to scoop the sea with a sieve. Did you hear what they're saying at the market?" Rahmat asked, sitting down next to him and rolling a cigarette. "They say the Chinese are testing sonar, or the Americans are drilling the bottom."
"If they were drilling, there'd be vibration," Isak flicked his cigarette butt into the water. It hissed and sank instantly. "But here, it's silence."
The silence was the most terrifying part. Usually, the port was a cacophony of gull cries, engine noise, and stevedores cursing. Now the port was mute. The gulls had vanished three days ago. The rats left yesterday. Only the humans remained—the stupidest animals, who always hope until the very end that the storm will pass them by.
"Look," Rahmat whispered suddenly, his hand freezing as he held his lighter.
Isak followed his gaze. About ten meters from the pier, a glow was rising from the black depths. It didn't look like a searchlight or the phosphorescence of plankton. It was a deep, saturated indigo color that pressed against the eyes.
The water didn't foam; it simply parted, releasing something to the surface.
It was a feather. As long as a human arm, wide like a fan. It shimmered with moist violet and gold, lying on the water without getting wet, as if coated in grease or a force field.
"Garuda...!" Rahmat exhaled, and in his voice rang a primal terror that no Islam or Catholicism could beat out of him. "They are surfacing, Isak. The tales lied. Garuda does not live in the sky."
Isak felt a cold chill run down his spine, despite the thirty-degree heat. He suddenly remembered his dream, the one he hadn't told anyone about. The feather slowly drifted against the current, moving toward the open sea. Toward the Weber Deep.
"Pack your things, old man," Isak said quietly, standing up. "We need to get away from the water."
"Where to?" Rahmat smiled bitterly. "We are on an island, son. Beyond the water, there is only the sky, and the sky is too high these days."
Chapter 2. Contact
The Coast Guard cutter Pattimura was a rusty bucket patched together with paint and prayers, but the equipment on board was new, expensive, and alien. Crates marked in English and Russian were piled on the deck, thick black cables snaked around, and generators hummed.
They had taken Isak as a guide—formally, to point out currents and shoals. In reality, just to have someone to throw overboard if the sea spirits demanded a sacrifice.
Colonel Hadi, a sweaty man with small, mean eyes, nervously fingered his holster. Next to him, clutching the railing, stood Doctor Morozov—a huge, flabby Russian in a crumpled white coat who looked as ridiculous here in the tropics as a fur coat would.
"We are over the point," the loudspeaker rasped. "The Weber Deep. The deepest hole on the planet, not counting the oceanic trenches. Seven and a half kilometers of void under the keel."
"Activity?" Hadi barked.
"Off the charts," Morozov replied without looking up from his tablet screen. His glasses were fogged up. "This isn't tectonics, Colonel. I've told you five times, tectonics doesn't have a rhythm. But this... this is like a heartbeat. Just very slow. One beat per minute."
Isak stood aside, feeling the deck vibrate. But the vibration didn't come from the engine. The hum came from below, penetrating through the soles of his boots, rising through his bones, echoing as a dull ache in his teeth.
They are here, Isak thought.
The water around the cutter suddenly ceased to be water. It turned into boiling milk. Gas bubbles burst with a hiss, releasing the stench of hydrogen sulfide.
"Back! Everyone back!" Hadi screamed, drawing his pistol. The fool was about to shoot at the ocean.
From the foam, they rose. Three of them. Isak expected to see monsters, tentacles, slime—everything cheap movies use to scare you. But this was beauty. Terrifying, perfect, inhuman beauty.
The creatures resembled a hybrid of a bird and a stingray. Their "wings," spanning ten meters, were covered in rows of tightly fitted plates that glowed with that same indigo color. They had no beaks—only flat, streamlined faces with enormous black eyes that reflected the sky. They hovered above the water, not flapping their wings, using something else. Anti-gravity? Magnetic fields? Water streamed off them in rivulets, but they remained dry.
"Fire at will..." Hadi hissed into the radio.
"Belay that order!" Morozov shrieked, lunging at the colonel. "Are you an idiot?! Look at the readings! They are generating a field of such power that your bullets will simply vaporize!"
And then Isak heard the Voice. It wasn't a sound. It was as if someone had inserted a flash drive directly into his brain and began unpacking a gigantic archive.
Pain pierced his temples. Isak fell to his knees, clutching his ears, though it didn't help. Images floated before his eyes—not pictures, but concepts. Through them, he saw the world threaded with strands of energy. He understood that oil, gas, atoms—it was all barbarism, bonfires in a cave. The birds were showing how to draw power from the planet's rotation itself, from temperature differences, from the vacuum. It was knowledge—pure, cold, perfect.
"We watched. You grew. You are ready. Take it—this is a key. Either you open the door to tomorrow, or you lock yourselves in a grave forever."
The message was clear. No mysticism, just the dry logic of a higher race providing a tool. The noise in his head stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The birds slowly descended back into the water, not waiting for an answer. The move was now up to the humans.
Silence reigned on the deck, broken only by heavy breathing. Morozov sat on the floor, head in his hands, rocking back and forth. Tears streamed down his cheeks.
"Brilliant," he whispered, his voice breaking into a hysterical chuckle. "It's so simple. God, how simple it is! The formula... I see the formula!"
Chapter 3. Monkey with a Grenade
Colonel Hadi slowly holstered his gun. His face changed; the fear was gone, replaced by an expression Isak had seen hundreds of times on market scalpers—greed and predatory calculation.
"Doctor," the Colonel's voice was frighteningly calm. "Can you reproduce this?"
"Reproduce?" Morozov raised his crazed eyes. "Colonel, this is free energy for all humanity! The end of hunger, the end of resource wars!"
"I asked, can you reproduce this?" Hadi repeated harshly. "Jakarta will like this. And not just Jakarta. Imagine the power. What a bomb..."
Isak looked at the water where the creatures had just vanished. Ripples spread, erasing the trace of the miracle.
"We are dead men," he said aloud. But no one heard him. People were already dividing the skin of a god they hadn't yet killed.
Time compressed in the camp. Only two days had passed, but to Isak, it felt like an eternity. The shore near Tual was no longer a beach; it was a construction site fenced with barbed wire. Heavy army trucks churned the mud, bringing in generators and tanks. The air trembled with the roar of diesel engines and cursing. It smelled not of the sea, but of hot metal and human sweat—the sour, heavy scent of fear mixed with greed.
Isak worked as a "gofer" in the command tent. He didn't care anymore. He was just waiting for the denouement, like a spectator in a movie theater who knows everyone dies at the end but can't leave the hall.
The tent was so full of smoke it stung the eyes.
"You don't understand!" Doctor Morozov's voice cracked into a scream. He looked terrible: bags under his eyes, shaking hands, coffee stains on his lab coat. "It's not a battery you can just plug into the grid! It's resonance! The birds gave us the principle of harmony. If we start pumping energy aggressively, we'll disrupt the balance of the plates!"
Colonel Hadi sat at the table, lounging in his chair. A satellite phone lay before him.
"Doctor, save your poetry for the symposiums," he said lazily. "Jakarta demands results. Washington and Beijing already know something is happening here. If we don't show that we control the Force, they will grind us to dust. We must launch the installation at full power this evening."
"This is madness!" Morozov grabbed his head. "It's like giving a monkey a grenade and hoping it doesn't pull the pin! We are in a subduction zone! If we cause dissonance..."
"Enough!" Hadi barked. "Sergeant, take the doctor out for some fresh air. Technicians, begin heating the circuit."
Morozov was dragged outside. Passing Isak, the Russian scientist suddenly stopped. There was no madness in his eyes anymore, only bottomless sorrow.
"Run, kid," he whispered in English. "Run high. Although... it won't help anymore."
That evening, the sky over the Banda Sea turned a sickly, bruised violet-crimson color, as if someone had punched the atmosphere itself.
Chapter 4. Silence
When they started the installation—a hastily assembled contraption of antennas and drilling equipment meant to "catch" the ether—the sound changed.
The low hum coming from underwater stopped abruptly. It was as if someone had thrown a switch. Absolute, ringing silence hung for a second. The birds fell silent. The abandoned dogs stopped howling. Even the wind died.
And then the Earth sighed.
It didn't feel like the usual earthquake Indonesians were used to. The ground didn't shake; it seemed to sag. Deeply, nauseatingly. As if a giant bubble had burst beneath the island. At the same time, the glass screens in the command tent shattered.
Isak stepped outside, looked at the horizon, and lit his last cigarette. He understood. The birds weren't offended. They weren't angry. They simply made a decision. The experiment was deemed a failure, and the laboratory was subject to sterilization.
The end of the world didn't look like a Hollywood blockbuster. There was no panic, no running crowds, no burning skyscrapers. There was only water.
Isak found Rahmat on the roof of the old "Grand Vilia" hotel, the tallest building in Tual—all of five stories. The old man sat on a lounge chair, staring toward the bay, chewing betel nut.
"They are leaving," Rahmat said calmly, pointing to the ocean.
The water was receding. Rapidly, terrifyingly. Tual Bay bared its bottom—dirty, silty, strewn with boat skeletons, plastic bottles, and tires. The ocean retreated, sucked into the horizon, as if someone had pulled the plug in a giant bathtub. Coral reefs were exposed, looking like dry bones. Fish thrashed in the mud, but the gulls didn't fly down to peck at them. The birds knew.
"It went far out," Isak assessed. "To the Deep itself."
"It will return now," the old man nodded.
On the horizon, a wall began to grow. At first, it was a thin dark strip separating the sky from the earth. But it grew with every second, obscuring the stars. It wasn't just a tsunami wave. The water rose unnaturally, violating the laws of physics. It was taking a shape.
Two gigantic wings, woven from black water and foam, unfurled from edge to edge of the horizon. The height of the crest reached into the stratosphere. The water blotted out the Moon.
It was Garuda. The Water God, come to wash away the filth.
"Beautiful," whispered Isak.
"Just," replied Rahmat.
Below in the city, they finally understood. Sirens wailed—a pathetic, squeaky sound in the face of eternity. Car headlights turned on, people trying to find salvation where there was none. Isak saw tiny figures of soldiers running across the exposed seabed, trying to shoot at the advancing wall of water.
Monkeys with sticks, he thought without anger. Just stating a fact.
The wall of water made no noise. It approached in a terrifying silence. The roar would come later, when millions of tons of ocean crashed down onto concrete and flesh. But for now, there was silence.
The majestic silence of the Abyss.
Isak looked at his cigarette, which had burned down to the filter, scorching his fingers. He flicked the butt down into the darkness.
"You know what hurts, father?" he asked as the shadow of the water wings covered them, plunging the world into darkness.
"What?"
"We almost figured it out. We just didn't have enough time."
"We didn't lack time, son," Rahmat said. "We had plenty of time. We lacked conscience."
Isak closed his eyes. He didn't want to see the moment of impact.
He felt the air become dense and humid. Then came the coolness. Not pain, not horror, but an endless, cleansing coolness.
The ocean returned to its place. Tual, Dullah Island, the military base, Jakarta's plans—everything vanished in a single instant, becoming part of a history that no one would be left to write down.
Over the smooth, mirror-like surface of the new sea, under alien, indifferent stars, peace reigned once more.
The End.