Preword: Soquo is pronounced "soh-KOO-oh"

Disclaimer: The language that is shown in italics in my story is purely of my own invention, any and all words used that DO have an actual meaning in any language, real or otherwise (that is not of my own invention) is completely coincidental and was not intentional.

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"Felaçía Öledèc soqüo mcvonô Çemáè ÑoquiÅ saï"

That was the first thing that Soquo ever heard. The soothing feminine voice that still haunted him and his memory. It was the only thing that he could remember past before his earliest concrete memory.

Like the fish with whom he swam, the silent beings that they were, he remembered little of the past. though he did not waste time to ponder on such things, since there was nothing he knew but the now.

The now and the wet and the creatures of his vast blue home. The sharks, the whales, the krill and shrimp, and the fish. His most recent family of half-sized scaly swimmates. Well, for now they were his family.

Because of the vast expanse of ocean, and his compulsive tendency to learn and explore, he often found himself wandering with multiple different schools of fish, pods of dolphins, etc. sometimes he had even fond himself wandering with a rogue shark or stray whale.

But there was never a time when he was ever truly and completely alone, (well, without the companionship of his fellow sea creatures) at least as far as his failed memory could recall, he could only remember fourteen thousand three hundred fifteen days into the past—not including the memory of the woman's voice that he had heard. He had no idea how long ago that had been. But he was never alone.

Alone.

The word always sent shivers up his spine, ever since he encountered that shredded old life vest while exploring his home and learned of the word from the humming, pulsing memories of fear, of alone…

He had never thought of the possibility of such a thing, of being alone when others are around you. It hadn't even bothered him at the back of his mind… he had never thought that there might be others, or that there might not be… until the actual memory of the emotion brought by this shred of a life vest.

The hum wasn't exactly a hum, but more of a tugging at the back of his mind, sometimes that made him a map of things around him, similar to sonar. And sometimes the humming allowed him to see into the memories of objects, sometimes things that were yet to come, sometimes it was just a reflection of what was happening now. Both the future and the present were rare finds in objects. Mostly it was merely the past.

This particular shred of bright orange life vest held the memory of a young man lost at sea. His name had been David Smith. The hum told Soquo that he had been on a ship called the HMS Titanic. The man's wife and daughter had been taken off of the ship already, and he was left with the rest of the 3rd class citizens on board, on the deck of the sinking ship. Mr. Smith had been the last man left alive in the water. He couldn't move his arms or legs, and he was close to death. No one around him moved either. And the man that floated next to him had stopped breathing puffs of steam long ago.

No one else was alive. He was alone.

He kept the life vest, tied it onto his back with a rope he had made from seaweed. He made sure not to read the end of the tale of it's wearer, not wanting to, but he kept it with him, shutting his mind to the tiny, continuous hum which emitted from it.

He still kept it since it held an important memory from the land, the most fascinating subject that he had learned from the memories from this, that, and other intriguing things he found from dry land.

Soquo had seen and felt many memories from the land, extraordinary things: finless creatures with strange, fiber-like hair ­sprouting from the tops of their head or out of their entire bodies, weird four-legged animals, some with only two legs, some with wings, some even had no legs.

He remembered four hundred days back, when he had caught his first glance of his reflection in an abandoned hand mirror he had found in a sunken boat. At first he thought that it was another creature of the ocean like the many he had encountered, until he realized that every move that he made, the reflection made as well.

The memory in this particular object wasn't all that significant to Soquo, just a young woman who enjoyed the high life, and then went out on the boat with her husband and just shipwrecked five miles from the coast. But the image of himself—white-green-pigmented skin, golden-black eyes, bald head, silvery gills—fascinated him, he was so used to the familiar faces of the humans whose memories he took from their abandoned objects. So he kept the mirror and tied it to his waist with the same rope that tied the shred of the life jacket to his back.

Also tied onto this greenish-red-brown rope was a makeshift spear made from a long stick of sharpened driftwood (he had felt the memories of this piece of driftwood which was made from an old tree that remembered back to the many Indians and their spears), a short knife he had found along with the mirror (he figured he'd need this along with the spear to fight off any creature with an intention to hurt him), and a small book made of many tiny drawings of people, which also had the memories of each portrait—the most mysterious of these drawings was that of a mermaid, but he found no memory of this creature, just the drawer in a room, drawing the picture, no mermaid. Nothing that seemed even remotely like himself.

The most interesting thing was not tied onto the rope, but rather burned onto the tender webbing between his fingers on his left hand: a series of designs, swirling, swooping, patterned and repetitious, but random and, somehow, changing.

One day the design would have one swoop in one place, between his pinkie and ring finger, then the next day when he would wake up, the same design would be between his thumb and forefinger and then gone the next day. Same with the swirls and dots. There was a certain… air… of bad omen to the strange tattoo-like scars… It wasnot a hum, but just a feeling of a warning of what was to come that Soquo had whenever he glanced at it.

He had long since given up on understanding the changing pattern. Without a memory to give its meaning, it was just random nonsense to him. So he ignored it, but never forgot it, although during his wanderings, his mind strayed back to the patterns on his mutilated flesh, continuously contemplating the many possible meanings to this changing pattern.

While swimming leisurely with his many families of migrating fish, his mind would wander to the ridged scar tissue and he would block out his senses to contemplate the various meanings of this patterned tattoo. After these long days of pondering, he came to the conclusion that he should set out to look for people of his own kind.

The next day, he found a large school of migrating fish and set out with them to look for his own kind.