Endings

It’s not everyday that you are woken up with a gun pointing into your head. That’s what I woke up to yesterday, the day it all ended.

It’s over. And I may as well tell you now that Seth is gone. The Dolphin Man is dead.

If you are looking at this blog for the first time this won’t make much sense. I’ll make it easy for you. Go back to the first part, Introductions, and find your own way from there. What I tell you now will make better sense for it.

I don’t know how long it will be before the US military, CIA, or whatever authority it was come back for their sick secret, or find this blog and shut it down. You may as well read the story now. Shame I can’t promise you a happy ending.

It will tell you how I ended up being herded onto a boat at gunpoint by an American agent and a crazy neuroscientist, with my ex-lover, Seth – The Dolphin Man – and three local Maori who hated Seth because they believed he had brought bad spirits to their island. In a way he did.

It was the American Mr Walker (I call him wanker), holding the gun of course. He told me to get dressed. I did. I got ready to go out to sea. Out on the boat that would take us to the dolphins, out to where he and the neuroscientist, Doc Weybridge, hoped the special sensor would be recovered. The sensor that had been attached to the back of a baby dolphin by Seth, the Dolphin Man, months ago as part of a semi-secret but legitimate dolphin communication study.

You could say that Seth worked innocently and in good faith in the name of research. But I knew him, we were lovers once. You could also say he hid behind the name of science and carried on acting like the fool he always was.

Unfortunately for Seth, it was much more than just a sensor, more than a simple tracking device. It turned him insane. It made him think he was a dolphin. And then it killed him.

This is what happened.

We’d all agreed to go out on the boat a few days ago on a mission to get the sensor back, without guns of course. But as soon as we got on the boat I realised that wanker was only pointing his gun at me and Seth.

I’m not angry at the Maori for being complicit. I’m more angry at myself that I didn’t see it coming. I knew they disliked me, and I knew they hated Seth, but I had no idea they had been bought by the Americans.

The father, Anuha, drive the boat and Tama, the older son, kept watch over us with wanker. Until we saw the dolphins, they never took their eyes off us. Not once.

The younger son, Kiki, helped the Doc with the nets and harpoons they would use to get the baby dolphin on board. Kiki used to be Seth’s friend. I think he felt guilty about his part in spearing the dolphin with the sensor in the first place. He wanted to make it good for his father, the spirits, his nightmares whatever.

And there was me thinking that I got the Maori onto the boat to protect me. How stupid stupid stupid I have been all along. Beginning with coming here in the first place. But thank god they do have more soul than sense, or I would not be alive to tell you how this story ended.

We were miles out to sea when we caught up with the pod. The dolphins swarmed about the boat and after only minutes we could see the baby, which was bigger than I thought, more a juvenile, leaping out of the water edging ever closer to the boat with each dive.

It was so close we could see that the tether with the sensor attached was lodged deep into it’s flesh. Seth was a fool to have thought that harpooning the poor animal would bring anything except disaster. I didn’t pretend he was conjuring a plan to save us. He just stared at the pod and looked less human than ever.

The Doc had the electronic ‘medusa’ cap on his head again. He was using it to try to get the baby right up against the boat, but without Seth it didn’t work.

After twenty minutes he threw off the cap and he and the Maori tried to hook the sensor from the dolphin with long poles but it was a pathetic effort. It was never going to work.

Kiki and his brother deployed the nets, and their father Anhua steered the boat to encircle the pod. I’m these people are brilliant fishermen, but that didn’t really work either. Maybe the their hearts weren’t in it. I caught awkward looks between the men. I learned from this blog how sacred these animals are to the Maori. They guided their ancestors to these islands. I don’t know, maybe the dolphins knew. Either way, the dolphins were having none of it.

Wanker was not going to accept failure though. As we all watched the dolphins and wondered what to do, he was readying a harpoon gun. No one saw this until the air exploded with noise and his body shook as the cable unloaded into the sea, into the pod, aiming for the baby when it next came up for breath.

It was all of twenty feet away but he missed. I guess it wasn’t his type of weapon. The harpoon sliced into the pod and the sea raged when it hit another dolphin, an adult.

And then Seth screamed. The first time I had heard him make a sound since I came to the island. A sound I have never heard a person make.

Then he dived into the sea, into the pod, and was, for a moment, lost to the water.

Then gunfire. It’s not so much the sound that keeps me awake as the smell. Wanker was holding a machine gun and sprayed the sea with bullets. I don’t know whether he was aiming for Seth or the baby dolphin.

And then everything changed. The Maori raged at each other in their own tongue, and Tama flew at wanker, sending him sprawling into the bloody sea with a flying kick as he reloaded the gun, which he dropped. He barely saw it coming.

Seth we saw only once more, rolling out of the waves with his arm on the dorsal fin of a dolphin, intertwined, swimming, trying to breathe. I’m not sure if it was the baby or not, I couldn’t see the sensor or the tether. Perhaps he managed to pull it free. Perhaps.

Anuha stopped the boat, and that was the last we saw of Mr Walker, Seth, the baby… the whole dolphin pod just swam away and we watched them leave in silence.

The Doc just stood on the boat with his eyes and mouth wide open. I think he was about to speak when Tama started to beat him with the but of the harpoon gun.

I picked up the machine gun and stopped him. Well, I held the gun, Anuha said something to his son and he ceased the attack.

I wanted answers from the Doc. So I did something I never thought I would do. I threatened to kill him, and I think I meant it. It’s easier when you’re holding a gun.

He probably thought we were going to kill him anyway, so he told us everything.

The sensor was much more than just a tracking device. It was a primitive mind-control machine. Yeah, mind control. How sick is that? That’s what he and Seth were doing in that tent: using their minds to bring the dolphins back.

For decades, the US Navy had been training dolphins to locate sea mines, but outside of the secret training pools, they had a habit of disappearing when set free in the sea to do it for real in war. Serious, they were used in Iraq and everything.

So they started to research ways of actually controlling the dolphins. It was technology spun out from brain-machine interfaces… the machines that paralysed people can use to control computers. Even trained monkeys can use them, you just saw their little skulls off and marry the electronics to neurons in the brain.

And specific stimulation could make brain cells grow a certain way, find new connections, override some parts of the brain at the expense of others. You turn off parts of the modern brain and the primitive one takes over. It’s the two different hemispheres, two brains in one… then he started going on about dolphins… the way the breathe, it’s voluntary, so as a conscious act they never really sleep? They just turn one side of their brain off? I lost him there. I understood him less than I believed him.

The early versions had to be implanted into the brain of the sender and the receiver. Seth’s sensors were the first wireless prototypes. You just had to get it close enough to the brain and the electromagnetic waves would do the rest, the same way you can see inside a brain with a scanner, except these things didn’t just scan they changed, modified, and then controlled.

Sick, isn’t it? Fucking mind control with men and dolphins. Fucking men.

Seth thought he had access to the latest military tracking and communication technology but he was wrong. Very wrong. Instead of first generation models, he received the latest fifth-generation prototype. Barely out of the laboratory. Never before tested on wild, untrained dolphins.

The sensor’s other half, the receiving station, was back in Seth’s hut. As a wild, untrained human, he didn’t stand a chance against the primordial sensory assault. I don’t know what really did the damage: his dolphin complex, weakness as a person, or that ancient story that forever reminded him that years ago he’d accidentally killed his two best friends.

The sickest part is that it was just a random mistake. There was a time when I thought the Americans arrived because I came to help and used this blog to scream at the world. But the Doc says that Seth was just sent the wrong sensors, discovered in an internal audit of all things, a stock check, and that as soon as the mistake was uncovered they came to rectify the mistake.

For a while I didn’t believe him. You don’t lose equipment like that. I thought they were using Seth as some kind of guinea pig. Man on an island, on his own, no one around to see what would happen, and it had all gone wrong.

But then I remembered that they haven’t been reading this blog at all. Not the Maori, the Americans. No one. All this time I was wondering why they hadn’t shut this blog down and the answer is because they still don’t know it exists. Why else let me use a computer with satellite broadband, the one I’ve been writing this on? If Seth was their experiment they would have known his every move, monitored the satellite link, something, anything to keep track of their precious cargo.

I think he’s telling the truth, the Doc. Perhaps it was a mistake and they just had to put it right on the quiet.

This would explain why we, everyone connected with the events of the past few months, were all herded into one place on the new boat. They were going to recover the sensor and then kill Seth, me, the Maori, and sail away and no one, no one would ever know otherwise.

When I realised this I felt like killing him again, but only for a moment. A kind of euphoria hit me when I realised that there was, for the first time, a way out for me.

I didn’t kill the Doc of course. I don’t even know if the gun was loaded. I told the Maori we weren’t killing him too.

They chatted between themselves until Anuha fired up the boat and we headed back to the shore. It was actually a detour to a tiny coral atoll. Tama ordered him off the boat and we left him there. He didn’t protest.

I have no idea if there’s any fresh water on that island so he’s might be done for. Then again, he’s a resourceful sort so maybe if he can start a fire he’ll make it. Some ships pass by here. Yes, I think he will. It doesn’t feel like we’ve murdered anyone.

We dumped everything else overboard. While we turned the boat over for evidence we found quite a lot of money. Guilty looks all round. It was probably the money the Maori were promised to get me and Seth off the island.

Unreal, that they were probably going to be killed and dumped overboard shortly after me and Seth were killed and dumped overboard and that that money was never going anywhere but back to the American’s paymasters.

We got back to the beach, I took my stuff, Seth’s computer and they took me back to the mainland. None of us said good bye. I know that they will never speak of this again. It wouldn’t surprise me if left the island forever in their new boat. The end.

I’m writing this from somewhere very different now. I’ll be lying low and I have enough money to do whatever I want.

I suppose this story would not be complete if I didn’t tell you how I got Seth out of his batch and into the tent to bring the dolphins back.

No, I didn’t have sex with him. First, I just told him that I came here because still loved him. I hoped that even though had the mind of a dolphin and the body of a famine victim he still had the heart of a man. I didn’t work because I don’t. He just didn’t believe me.

So I told him to do it for his friends. The ones who died in the crash.

It wasn’t easy. It took a while but eventually he opened his eyes and I knew some of him was still there. The isolation, his life as the dolphin was self-harm, a disgusting penitence of sorts for the crash. He was going to slowly starve himself to death in that stinking batch. He knew what he was doing.

I offered him a future he refused. Then I offered him a way out of the past and he relented.

I’m not sure if I meant it or not. At the time I thought I was saying it to save him, it was the only way, but maybe I was just trying to save myself.

It doesn’t matter. Seth will be dead by now. In good health he’s an incredible swimmer, but in that state I don’t think he would have stood a chance of getting back to shore in the cold. Maybe that sensor just scrambled his brains, but I like to think he chose to live out his last hour with the dolphins.

I suppose Seth knew we didn’t have a future together, really. Maybe he just wanted to be with the dolphins more than he wanted to be with me.

Is that a good death?

Is this a good story?

I can’t see any winners.

Histories

This will all end soon.

Tomorrow, if the weather holds, we are heading out on a boat to see the dolphins. They are back, less than 100 miles away.

Whatever Seth and Doc Weybridge have been doing in that tent the last week has worked. Somehow, they made a pod of dolphins that was 1000 miles away come back to where they were all those months ago before men started messing around with them.

Among the dolphin pod is a baby dolphin with a sensor attached to it. And I know now that that’s what this is all about.

The Americans didn’t come here to save Seth. They didn’t come because I raised the alarm. They just came to get their sensor back.

It’s a pretty special piece of equipment, the Doc told me that himself. I guess my cooperation has earned me some answers.

I made a bigger fire tonight and we got a bit drunk tonight on the beach, my home, on the last of the booze I blagged from the Maori. The Doc said that Seth should never have had the sensors at all. He said it was all a mistake, just a stupid mistake. He kept saying this again and again, staring at the sand, the sea, and then at me.

I asked him what the sensor is really for. He laughed at me. Then he got all serious and said he would tell me tomorrow, when everything is over. He says everything will be fixed, and then I’ll be free to go.

And who is going to take Seth? I can’t see him going anywhere.

I suppose that since I have some answers I should give you some. Years ago Seth killed his friends. Not deliberately, but he killed them all the same.

There were four of us in a car. Seth was driving. He wasn’t drunk or anything, but we had an accident. It wasn’t even his fault. A jury agreed.

It was with our two best friends, the ones that Seth mentioned in this blog before, just once, when he started to crack a bit. They both died. We survived.

Our relationship didn’t of course. He couldn’t cope at all. Could you? Your two best friends? Seth couldn’t, and he cracked. I’ll spare you the details.

In the middle of getting put back together he ran away. Around the world, studying the dolphins that we all swam with once, just a few hundred miles from here in Kaikora in New Zealand. An unforgettable day.

I guess in my own way I ran away too. I ran away from Seth and never looked back. Well, I tired not too. But then someone sent me a link to his blog when I was in Australia. I was happier running.

You know, there are self-help books, pills and therapy groups for every problem a person could have, but you try finding one for people who have killed their friends.

I don’t think I can write anymore about the past.

Tomorrow, we go out on a new boat that Mr Walker, wanker, arrived in today.

The Doc needs Seth on the boat. Seth won’t go without me, and I won’t go without the Maori.

So we’re all going to go.

Wanker, unsurprisingly, is freaking about this.

I know they have different agendas. Wanker is no scientist. It’s the Doc’s job to get the sensors back. Wanker wants as few people to know about it as possible.

You can feel the tension between him and the Doc now. They have been arguing at the bottom of their voices. It scares me more when I can’t hear them, but there doesn’t seem to be any point not seeing this story through to the end.

Whatever that will be.

Solutions

Everything has changed. I know that soon, one way or another, this will all be over.

We are going to get the dolphins to come back. And then we’ll get the sensor back. That’s what the Americans want. And it might, just might, be a way to get Seth back.

So I’m going along with the plan. And it’s working.

The Americans needed Seth out if his batch and in their new tent, the one with all the headcase equipment. The Doc says the equipment will bring the dolphins back, but they need Seth too. Wanker could physically wrestle him in there no problem, but we need Seth, and his mind, onside.

That’s where I came in. I had to get Seth out of his batch and into the new tent. I had to get him to play ball.

Wanker said I should do whatever it takes. I know what he meant.

He disgusts me. They all do.

I didn’t love Seth as a man anymore how could I love him as The Dolphin Man?

But getting Seth out of his hut was easier than I thought. It just took the right words. He doesn’t talk, but he listens. I won’t tell you exactly how I did it, not yet. I might tell you when this is over. Or maybe I won’t. It’s personal. It’s between me and him.

So, for nearly a week I have done little more than sit by Seth’s side inside the tent and hold his hand where he and the Doc are strewn out on the floor, heads entwined in a sick, spaghetti-like mess of wires and electrodes.

Together, I think, they are bringing the dolphins back. It’s working. Each morning the Doc is a bit more excited, and on the monitor I can make out the dolphin pod inching its way back down the sea trench to the islands.

I’m not scared anymore. Two reasons.

First: Seth needs me, and they need him, so I’m safe now.

Second: I realised last week, in the last post, that the Maori weren’t reading this. It’s so obvious it’s kind of embarrassing. The Americans aren’t reading it either.

Back when I got here and raised the alarm, the Americans arrived two days later. I was convinced they’d been reading this so I thought it was because of me. But no, no one is reading this at all. Seth got comments when he was writing this blog. But ever since he lost it… silence.

It explains why the Americans have never been that bothered about me using Seth’s computer. They don’t know it’s his, they think it’s mine. It explains why this blog hasn’t been shut down… the people who sent the Americans here, who made these mind-bending sensors, the people who want them back have no idea that I’m sitting here trying to tell the world about it all.

But if no one knows I’m here, with them, I have no protection.

Anything could happen.

Men and machines

Now I am really scared and very hungover.

I’ll tell you why I’m scared first.

I woke up this morning to find a new tent erected on the beach right outside Seth’s hut, pretty much blocking the way in. I crawled out of my sleeping bag in the forlorn hope that it might be full of food or something. Stupid girl. As soon as I wandered in Mr Walker, wanker, threw me out.

And I can see why. What I saw was disgusting.

Once me and Seth took acid at the Glastonbury festival. I stumbled around the Greenfields where all the hippy face-painting, poetry reading and tarot-card stuff is dotted about. I saw a tent with what looked like tiny red lights flying around in it so I went in.

Inside were all these people wearing sci-fi goggles, eye masks and headphones. The goggles were supposed to induce a trance by flashing lights that would stimulate the retina of each eye at different frequencies in alignment with alpha, beta or whatever brain wave bullshit it was.

I was horrified. I freaked out. They all looked like they were dead: motionless bodies wired up like brain dead cyber-zombie-freaks. One man with dreads looked like he was wired into the ground, his girlfriend prostrate like a cadaver across his corpse. I lost it that day and I never took acid again.

And that is almost exactly what it looked like in the tent in the three seconds I was there. This time, only Doc Weybridge was lying down wearing weird glasses, more like a visor, over his eyes and there were hundred of electrodes attached to his shiny, perspiring head, making him look like a techno-medusa or something.

Back on the beach in my tent I started to cry, then I threw up and had a panic attack.

When I came to, I decided that I would try and get myself out of this hole or drink myself to death. I’m still writing this, so here’s the beginning of my drunk story.

So I stormed over to the Maori’s house and demanded they take me off the island.

They refused.

So I demanded alcohol, food, and more alcohol. I said a good deal more, about how they left me on the beach with a bunch of freaks, about how they weren’t real men, and well, if you’ve read anything in the last few posts about MY life since I arrived here you can fill in the blanks yourself.

They were satisfyingly shocked. Imagine the scene: I sleep in a bag on the beach, I’m half naked and covered in insect bites, I wash in the sea. THEY have a house and have left me outside on my own for DAYS!!!! Leaving me on the beach to sleep under the stars with a madman and be eaten alive but eat nothing but fish caught by a man who thinks he’s a dolphin.

They looked guilty, but not guilty enough.

As it goes, Seth is right, they are hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. This is the total extent of the conversation between me and Kiki:

Kiki: What’s wrong with him?

Me: He thinks he’s a dolphin.

Kiki: He is cursed.

Me: No, he is a dolphin.

Kiki: He is cursed because of the baby dolphin. He shot at it. He killed it.

Me: Maybe, I don’t know.

Kiki: Who are the Americans?

Me: I don’t know. Scientists? Spies?

Kiki: Will they take him away?

Me: I don’t know.

I think the last bit made them realise that we should probably be on the same team. They spoke to each other in their language and then began to fill my arms with food and booze.

Now I realise they aren’t reading the blog otherwise I think they would have invited me in by now. Of course they aren’t, they don’t have satellite broadband like Seth’s computer. My computer now.

I don’t even know why I am writing this anymore. I suppose it gives me something to do. Someone has to finish the story.

When I got back to my tent the Americans asked me where I had been. I showed them the bottles, three wine and two spirits, and got to work.

They asked why I had left, but I ignored them and empowered myself by drinking.

I guess I must have passed out before I died.

The man who thinks he’s a dolphin

This is what my new life is like.

Seth (I will not be calling him the dolphin man) is out of bed now. He’s doesn’t seem to need the Americans, Dr Walker and Dr Weybridge, to nurse him all day anymore. They’ve been giving him drips and drugs and seem a bit more relaxed. Walker won’t talk to me, and Weybridge has been absorbed in bringing Seth back from the brink. He says they have a plan now, but he doesn’t say what it is, or when he will tell me.

I am also puzzled at why they don’t mind my using this computer, Seth’s satellite laptop which lives with me now, to update this blog but that’s just one of many things I don’t understand.

For instance, I don’t understand how Seth can go fishing and catch fish without using a mask or fins. It’s true. He gets up at dawn and goes fishing. Spear fishing. I watch him from my tent as the sun rises. He still has the speargun that Kiki gave him, I’ve seen it in his hut, but now he’s using long thin slender spears made of wood with metal and bone attachments on the end.

He goes swimming in the morning for half an hour, and comes back with fish. It’s quite amazing really until you remember that’s all he’s capable of.

He eats his raw, and then wraps up a couple in a palm leaf for me. If this were years ago I would be impressed, touched even, by the way he leaves me food each morning.

I make a fire to cook mine. This evening Walker and Weybridge went off to see the Maori, and Seth came down and sat with me for a while. He must have heard me crying.

I told him I’d been reading the blog, and how I was worried after the weird posts and the long silence… he nodded but didn’t say anything. That’s all I have for proof that he can hear me at all.

The state he’s in it’s physically hard to look at him.

I can’t get him to wear any clothes. He’s skinny like a famine victim, and he’s got more insect bites and scratches on his body that I can count, probably from coral when he goes fishing as he can’t see anything.

And then there’s the sores from spending so long in bed, and the wound on his back which has changed. I’m sure it was self-inflicted. It looks a bit less infected. Probably because the seawater is washing out the puss and crap.

Pity it won’t wash his brains out. He still won’t talk, even though we both know he understands me. My arriving here has freaked him out. I saved his life really, but he’s so… nonchalant… out there… it makes me think he didn’t want to be saved at all. He wouldn’t have lasted another week.

As soon as the sun goes down Seth just retreats back to his hut and lies down next to his equipment, which he arranges to partially block the door. You can hear him murmur “Kuru… Kuru… Kuru…” as he sleeps while he’s away… away with the dolphins.

I know I loved him once but we’ve lost him. The man is insane.

I sleep on the beach in my tent. It’s cold at night and there are flies, insects and tiny crabs and god knows what else and I’m covered with bites too.

I have strange feelings about how this will all end. I should be relieved now that Walker and Weybridge are here and Seth won’t die, but instead I’m frightened in another way. I maxed out my last credit card island hopping my way here, so until the American’s mystery plan comes together, I’m stuck too.

A survivor speaks

I am a survivor from Seth’s previous life. A long time ago, me and the Dolphin Man, Seth, were lovers. That’s his name. Seth.

He’s not going to die anymore. Walker and Weybridge are taking care of that, giving me time to sit on the beach and ponder my new reality: writing a blog on behalf of a man who went insane on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere by messing around with dolphins… messing around with nature.

I think he’s surprised that I came, that I found him, but it was easy, really. It took a lot of asking and some dark stares as I got nearer but I knew he’d be here.

We’ve been here before, well, very near to here, a neighbouring island. Four of us came, me and Seth and our two best friends. When they were alive and we were all friends.

That was what started it all for Seth, that gap year, backpacking our way around the world. We all did the touristy dolphin swimming thing. He always said he wanted to come back and study the dolphins properly. We all thought it was a joke then but things happened, and he did it. He went back to uni, did the phd, got the publications…

How many years ago was that? I don’t care to count. The past is the past.

He’s lucky. If I hadn’t been travelling around Australia I wouldn’t have come at all.

Arrivals

Help has arrived! I think.

It wasn’t quite the rescue I expected but the panic is over. We are saved.

Yesterday I saw the Maori, all three of them, tying up a new boat and then walking down the beach towards me. At first I thought that at last they’d decided to help, but no, they were just guiding a new arrival to this smelly, shitty corner of the world.

The first arrival calls himself Mr Walker. He’s American, has a strong New York accent, and is not dressed for the weather. It’s not summer anymore but he only wears a suit even though it’s hot in the day and freezing at night. He says he’s a scientist, works for the US government, and he’s come to get their property back.

That’s pretty much all he has said. I asked why no one from the university has come and he just said it’s been duly noted, will be taken care of, and that I didn’t need to worry: more help would arrive.

Then he asked who I was. I was so shocked I could have died on the spot but then I realised I haven’t told anyone who I am, so how would he know? Today has been weird, so it will just have to wait.

I asked him if I could leave and he eventually says that he wouldn’t stop me from leaving if I want to, but that I should stay for a while to look after ‘my friend’. Doesn’t he realise that looking after ‘my friend’ is the only help we need?

Anyway, Walker slept in his clothes outside the door of the hut and returned today with an older, shorter man, Dr Weybridge.

He’s more approachable than Walker, and is the real scientist and looks the part too: short, balding lanky greasy hair, thick glasses etc. He speaks quickly and is nervous but is helpful so I like him.

He’s asking me lots of questions. What I know about the project, what I know about dolphins, what the locals have been up to. I think he actually cares because he asked how I was bearing up, about bloody time!

But they won’t actually tell me what’s going to happen now. I can’t believe for that they came here without a plan of what to do. “Something,” the doc says, “We’ll do something.”

The doc made a shiny new tent up for me so I don’t have to sleep in that awful hut. In fact, I haven’t our ‘Dolphin Man’, since the Americans arrived.

I don’t care. They can look after him now.

I don’t want to see him. I’ve seen him enough.

PLEASE!!!!!!

I need help here.

I tried talking to the locals. They say he is cursed, and worse, and refuse to do anything to help.

There’s a sore, a wound on his back and its infected and weeping all sorts of smelly shit all over the place. There are rotting fish everywhere in his room and piles of puke, urine… you would not believe the stench.

He’s naked and won’t leave his bed. He is a skeleton. He’s starving to death. I that he’s lost the power of speech because I knew him and he would speak to me.

I can’t call for help because my phone doesn’t work out here in the middle of nowhere, that’s why he has a satellite laptop, the one I’m writing this on now. I’ve sent a few emails, but I don’t think anyone is taking me seriously.

Grief, where the hell is everyone? Why am I the only one here?

Where are the people that sent him in the first place?

PLEASE!

Help!

I found him. It doesn’t look good.

Please, somebody has to come here and soon or he’ll die. I can’t make him move, eat or drink anything.

We’re on a tiny island just off the coast of Pitt Island. It’s one of the Chatham Islands in the South Pacific, about 500 miles from New Zealand.

Someone, anyone who is reading this please send help NOW!

What university is sponsoring all of this? Where the hell are they?

…