One | Contact (Emmanuel)

    The ocean has always calmed me. When I was younger, my father would take me fishing with him, off the coast of Maryland. We never really caught anything, but when we did, he would always cut the fish open with his special knife and show me how its internal systems worked. I was enthralled from the very beginning, and I knew at seven or eight years old that I wanted to be like him, someday.
    I sit on the bow of the boat in solitude, the surrounding area silent save for the constant drum rolls of the waves. It's a good kind of quiet, the kind that helps you to focus.
    Slowly, carefully, I extend a hand over the side of the boat. My gloved hand pushes the test tube clasped between my fingers deep into the cloudy, not quite blue water, and I make sure to not get any on my skin. The agent I'm testing is an algae, and I know that it could very well be poisonous when exposed to human flesh.
    My hand shakes slightly as I bring the now full glass instrument back to the surface. The liquid swirls in a cyclonic pattern, and it's entrancing to watch. After a moment, I stand and take it with me to the small, cluttered table where my papers lay. I set it gently in the test tube rack, making sure to not spill any specimens.
    After it's secure, I pull off my hideously green work gloves so I can better organize the unruly mess of materials on the table. Throwing them into the sink, I stare despondently down at my workspace. Papers are strewn about maniacally, littering every sharp, square corner with my awkwardly small, hard-to-decipher handwriting. The only thing I can make out from a moment's glance is my name, Emmanuel T. Ngundi, scrawled out in horrible cursive across the top of the pages.
        "Emmanuel!" An ominous-sounding shout comes from somewhere behind me. "Manny!" Wait. I know that voice.
        I whirl around, startled, to see Nicholas Shaw running over to me from the stairs to the lower deck, his short, stubby legs moving as quickly as they can.
        "What is it, Nick?" I ask breathlessly, the air having been forced from my lungs when I gasped, not expecting him to burst through so quickly...or at all, really.
        Nicholas takes a moment to regain control of his breathing, which has gone haywire from the short burst of running he's done. "Manny, something's wrong-" he manages after a few minutes.
        I can feel my face contort and contract into an almost seamless mask of confusion and concern. "What do you mean?" Even my tone of voice is gravely serious.
        "Well, uh," Nick begins, stuttering and stumbling over his words. "You see-"
       "Get to the point, Nicholas," I interject after a few painful seconds that feel like years. "Get on with it, already."
        Nick nods quickly, so quickly I'm afraid his neck will snap in two. "The boat. We...we're having an, um, engine failure, and I-I don't know if we can fix it."
        Now, that's what I call breaking news. Important news, at that. That piece of information is probably the single most interesting thing I've heard all day. Because, face it, when you're a researcher like I am, not everything is always entertaining. It's what we do for the jobs we're interested in.
         "Aright," I answer, as calmly as I possibly can. Hopefully, the matter-of fact tone of voice will keep Nick on track and me from totally freaking out before I actually need to - if given a reason to in the first place. "So, what does that mean for us?"
         Nick shifts his weight between his feet, staring down at the grainy, light brown wood of the deck. "It means...it means that we probably don't have long left before the boat sinks and we all die. But we can't be sure of that, right now. You never know, right?" He tries to laugh, and I can tell that it's half-hearted and strained. His overly round, red face is way more splotchy than usual, and he's sweating, which is only slightly unusual for him.
        I take a short pause to let all of that new information sink in. Wow. So, basically, according to Nick, we're all doomed. Isn't that great?
        Yes. Always. Impending death is a rather inspiring thing to most writers of science fiction, so why can't it be an inspiration to me, a man of science, itself? After all, I work best under pressure.
        I, Emmanuel T. Ngundi, will not die on this cramped, tiny research vessel. And I'll try to make sure that everyone else gets out alive, too.
        I turn my full, focused attention back to Nick after a while. Apparently, he's been talking the whole time, but I didn't hear a word of it. Or, if I did, I didn't understand it at all. But people rarely understand Nick Shaw, in the first place, anyway, so its nothing out of the ordinary.
        "How long do we have?" I finally bring myself to voice the question that's been burning in the back of my mind since he told me what was going on. "I mean, I sort of need to know that if I can have any help in the solving of this problem."
        "I don't know, Manny. I really don't know. I've got Finn and James working on that right now, but even they can't be sure. No one can be sure, right now."
        Nick is slowly beginning to hyperventilate, and, in all honesty, it does scare me a little. He usually doesn't go this far into his freak-out modes. I set a hand on his shoulder carefully.
        "Hey. It's okay. We're probably not all going to die, yeah? At least one of us will make it out alive."
        He turns his head up to meet my eyes. "Nice quote. Should I put that in your obituary? Emmanuel Terrence Ngundi: a good man who believed that one person would survive from a whole boat full of people. Real nice, Manny."