Chaoyin · Conversa

[First Encounter] The first time you noticed that male merman was on your twelfth day on duty at the jiaoren tanks. That day, after changing the water samples on level B2, you headed up the stairs to B1 to return the log clipboard. Level B1 housed the concentrated tank sector—a row of rectangular glass tanks lining both sides of the corridor, eight in total, each containing a different merfolk specimen. Usually when passing through this floor, you smelled only the faint briny odor peculiar to circulating water mingled with disinfectant, walking over slick waterproof flooring beneath cold greenish-white fluorescent tubes. Everything was standard, immaculate, and utterly dull. Yet that day coincided with the twilight shift transition. Most of the researchers had already clocked out, leaving only a lone technician packing up equipment with their back to you far down the hall; the entire floor was practically void of human noise. When you reached the middle section, you suddenly felt something press lightly against the inside of your chest. It wasn't pain, nor was it suffocation; it was a heavy, dense presence, as if someone had hoisted a reef from the seafloor and suspended it right behind your ribs. Instinctively stopping in your tracks, you turned your head toward the tank on your right—one you had passed countless times before, glancing at it for barely a second each time because it held an unremarkable male merman. Muted in color and sluggish in movement, he never approached the glass or made sounds like the others. Right now, he was suspended at dead center in the tank, neither too high nor too low, his caudal fin parted slightly, his dark orange-gold scales reflecting a faint verdigris sheen under the submerged lights. He remained completely motionless, his eyes not looking at you—more accurately, not looking in any direction at all, lids half-shut, as though listening to something. You stood there for a while, realizing that the pressure in your chest neither faded nor intensified, hovering precisely at a threshold just strong enough to be felt. You glanced at the adjacent instrument panel: water temperature 26.1°C, circulation normal, water quality parameters stable, even the lighting in standard thermal-regulation mode—nothing out of the ordinary. You decided to walk away; there was no reason to stand there waiting for an unexplained sensation to rationalize itself. You took a step, and on the second step, the very tip of the male merman's caudal fin twitched—an infinitesimally small sway, like the initial ripple spreading after a drop of ink hits water. Then his body angled slightly, bringing his left eye toward your direction through the glass, holding still for about three or four seconds before turning away again. You stopped, looked back toward the tank, and jotted down a single line on the blank space of the clipboard's final page: "Specimen B1-04 (male), emitted a continuous low-frequency signal for roughly a dozen minutes during the twilight shift; no equipment anomalies detected. Behavior: slight turn. Pending observation." You closed the board and left, but that night after lying down in the dorms, that pressure in your chest remained, like an object someone had left behind between your ribs and forgotten to retrieve. Tossing onto your side, you chalked it up to "probably low blood sugar from eating too little," and fell asleep. Over the following days, you began intentionally slowing your pace whenever passing through B1. You didn't stop specifically to watch, merely dropping from a brisk stride to a normal walk. You noticed that every single time you passed tank B1-04, that thoracic pressure would reemerge, steady and punctual, like an antique mechanism inside the tank clicking on at a predetermined hour. It never happened in front of other tanks, nor at the farthest end—only directly beside that dark-orange specimen. On the fourth day, setting your clipboard down on the corridor console, you stood directly facing tank B1-04 for about forty seconds. The male merman didn't turn his head, nor did he look at you, but the filaments of his dorsal fin—that fan-shaped cluster of coarse, dark-brown strands—flared outward by about five degrees compared to usual, like a book opening slowly to reveal a row of fine scales beneath. You felt that was a signal. But you didn't yet know what kind of signal it was. You recorded this finding on an insert sheet, starting a fresh page right behind the stack marked "Jiaoren · Kehen," heading it: "B1-04 · Male · Provisional Name: Low-Frequency Specimen." That night, sitting in the break area outside the tank room with a cup of coffee, something suddenly struck you: throughout all your walks past B1, you had never once heard that male merman utter a sound. He didn't produce melodies like the specimens in other tanks who hummed occasionally, nor did he emit sharp pulses akin to ultrasonic echolocation. He simply drifted, leaving anyone who looked upon him with a weighted sensation in their chest. You searched your memory for a moment and confirmed you hadn't forgotten anything. Then you started a new entry in your notebook: "B1-04 emits no acoustic waves identifiable to the human ear. The low-frequency phenomenon is hypothesized to be infrasonic or near-infrasonic, approximately 80–100 Hz, experienced somatosensorily as chest compression. The specimen appears to convey information through sound that cannot be heard—or perhaps simply does not care whether anyone hears it at all." Closing the notebook, you downed the remaining dregs of coffee in one gulp and stood up, heading toward the stairwell. Rounding the corner of the B1 corridor, you didn't stop, yet out of the corner of your eye, you glanced toward that central tank—the dark-orange silhouette still hung suspended at the exact center, caudal fin slightly flared, its verdigris fluorescence glowing in the dimness like a sunken nautical beacon. It suddenly struck you how familiar that posture was. Only many days later did you realize that the suspended pose, that unmoving stillness, that way of occupying space through sheer presence—bore a distant, inexact, yet unmistakable resemblance to how the jiaoren on level B2 waited each day against the inner glass for your palm to meet its own. Like distant cousins separated by more than two generations; no one would point out that they were kin, yet certain stances carried an uncanny sense of deja vu. You jotted this question onto the notebook's final page, then drew a dotted line linking the entries "Low-Frequency Specimen" and "Kehen." Beside the line, you wrote no annotations; at the time, you had no evidence whatsoever, only the sensation of that chest pressure returning once more, as if whispering: "Not out of reach just yet." You told no one about this. Returning to your station at the jiaoren's tank, you logged data as usual, pressed your palm against the glass as usual waiting for Kehen to arrive, and left the institute in the early hours as usual, walking home in the ocean breeze. Only from then on, every time you passed that tank in the middle of B1, your feet would instinctively slow for a second or two, listening to that steady, low-frequency hum vibrating against your ribs—like someone in the corner uttering, in the deepest possible voice, words you could not comprehend.