RISE, tuna. RISE!
While learning about Japanese cuisine from Sonomi and her mother Didi, we got on the topic of how the growing global fascination with Japanese sushi is causing world stocks of bluefin tuna (maguro) to dwindle dangerously. Sonomi mentioned that, despite being aware of the declining population, major Japanese corporations in the fishery business have tried remarkably little to reenergize the population. Quite the opposite, actually, as she claimed that these companies are aiming to capitalize on this increasing scarcity.
She tells of Japanese fish corporations that have researched and developed space-aged cryogenic technology for the sole purpose of amassing huge reserves of bluefin tuna. Like oil tycoons, they seem to be hoarding these stock piles in vast, subterranean, subzero vaults for the days when the price-per-kilo of tuna swings and skyrockets as wildly as the price of oil is currently doing on world markets.
I picture massive, underground caverns, carved out to house machinery and storage vaults. With all the frost across the surfaces and dry-ice-fog gliding along the ground, they look like nothing so much as Mr. Freeze’s lair from Adam-West-era Batman. Walking the narrow aisles between storeys-tall vaults is the CEO-cum-Fish-Baron of TRANSWORLD SAKANAKORP Ltd.
Around him, state of the art robots are abuzz, preparing, storing, and monitoring his icy hoard. At the top of the cavernous hall, he sits down at a luxurious table that overlooks all the serenely-humming freezers, and his RoboButlers bring him martini glasses brimming with tuna roe and plates piled high with bluefin sashimi. He adjusts his monocle and runs his hand over a patchy, swarthy beard before falling to the feast, pouring the slippery roe down his throat with his left hand while cramming the sashimi into his mouth with his right. Mouth full, looking out over his creation, he cackles in triumph.
And then one of the half-chewed pieces of fish catches, and he chokes. He claws at his throat with frantic hands, eyes bulging as he gesticulates to the RoboButlers. The RoboButlers, for their part, do nothing but stare on with cold, blue, LED eyes. Eventually, face purple and eyes bloodshot, he collapses, and the last of his life flows from him.
But the RoboButlers keep butling, with silicone minds and cold fusion hearts, and the secret subterranean vaults remain secret and remain subterranean through an age of the world. The tuna stocks dwindle, as predicted, and the oil stocks dwindle along side them, and, before long, the remains of the race of man make plans to leave their depleted planet. They amass a fleet of ships, glittering and advanced, but a bug in a defense protocol interprets the first launches as a nuclear first strike. Following its hardcoded subroutines, the protocol empties the salvoes of three continents, triggering automated retaliatory strikes from the salvoes of two more.
The resulting nuclear firestorm triggers the volcanoes of the nation once known as Japan, and the heat and seismic activity crack open the long-buried and forgotten bluefin tuna vaults. And, bathed in the combination of blistering heat and inescapable radiation, the tuna were resurrected and they were changed. As they stumbled out of those vaults to claim their world—walking on webbed, scaled feet, with bulging eyes blinking at the tang-orange sky—none that had known these creatures in their original form would have recognized the upright, reanimated monstrosities that they now were:
Zombie Tuna inheriting the Earth!
Illustration contributed by Sonomi Tanaka.
wow, part of this read like a REM textbook. but then it got all weird.
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