THE WHALE

[VoltTurtle]

((...))

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale was a novel published in 1851, written by American writer Herman Melville. The book was written from the perspective of a sailor named Ishmael, detailing the story of Ahab, the captain of a whaling vessel known as Pequod. The plot of the novel can be summed up as a detailed account of the process of whaling before the invention of the harpoon gun, interspersed with Captain Ahab pursuing vengeance on an albino sperm whale known as Moby Dick, due to the latter having taken one of Ahab's legs many years prior.

The waterfall overlook was much the same as it always was. The rays of dawn scattered off the mist coming from of the mouth of the waterfall, the red-orange cloud giving the area a distinctly warm hue. Floral scents wafted in from the nearby jungle, permeating the area with an almost spring-like smell. A distinctly bloodstained patch of gravel sat not too far from the river, a trail of crimson leading directly from it to a rocky mound that poked out from the surrounding turf in a distinctly person-like shape. Sitting directly on top of the pile was a black, almost-empty daypack with the designation "G034" emblazoned on it.

Nearby the mound was a much larger, flat stone that was similarly stained sanguine. Behind the stone opposite the pile is a space blanket laid out on top of several spread-out, bloodstained clothing items. Another duffel bag with the designation "G009" emblazoned upon it sat at one end of the blanket. Roughly thirty feet from where the flat stone rests, away from the roaring river, one of the jungle trees sat with a vague impression of a smiling human face carved into its side, the carving facing the river. Marceline stood near the river facing the carving, her arms outstretched in front of her, gripping the AF2011-A1 tightly in both hands as she took aim at her makeshift target.

She hadn't slept very well following Amelia's death, despite her best efforts. Another nightmare had beset her that night, assaulting her with images of herself stabbing Amelia over and over again ad infinitum. While the dream had maintained the usual surreal quality that most of her dreams had, the most bizarre part had been the fact that the nightmare had seemingly taken place underwater, on the ocean floor, with schools of fish and whales obliviously swimming by as the violence took place unabated. She didn't exactly know why that nightmare in particular had taken place under the sea, and she didn't really care to theorize about it in detail. Maybe she had felt crushed by an ocean's worth of guilt and that manifested in her dream, maybe the sound of the rushing water lulling her to sleep had put the images in her head, or maybe she just watched one too many nature documentaries about the ocean before the trip. She certainly didn't have a clear answer, and she didn't really think it mattered, one way or another.

A thunderous roar erupted from the barrel of Marceline's pistol as she pulled the triggers, the powerful kick of the weapon sending vibrations through her arms and into her body, her ears left briefly ringing as a thin wisp of smoke exited the gun's muzzle. The shot had missed the carving, the bullets having instead grazed the side of the tree and disappeared into the jungle. An exasperated sigh escaped her lips as she rolled her shoulders, taking aim once again and firing another shot. The second attempt was much closer to its mark, both bullets hitting the side of the carving, but the noise from the second shot made her tense up significantly more than the noise from first shot had. She quickly stopped, gritting her teeth before closing her eyes and taking in a long, deep inhale. Opening her eyes and glaring at the target, she pulled the triggers again on the exhale. This time, both bullets hit dead-on, and for the first time all morning, a satisfied smile briefly crept onto her face, before just as quickly disappearing.

While she had no intention of psychoanalyzing herself based on a strange dream, it had the effect of making her think about Moby-Dick after she had woken up. When she was much younger she had gained a somewhat irrational fear of the ocean after having read both Moby-Dick and 10,000 Leagues Under The Sea in rather quick succession, something which had also inspired her to learn how to swim. While she had gotten over her fear eventually, ocean imagery always made her think of both books, and while she had discarded the thoughts of 10,000 Leagues fairly quickly, the ideas from Moby-Dick were far more persistent about staying in her head, and she had begun to form a thought experiment because of it.

Marceline took another deep breath, lowering the gun down. She blankly stared at the carving on the tree, now adorned with four indistinct wooden craters. Bringing the gun nearer to her body with one hand, she ejected the magazine and emptied the chamber, before loading the magazine back into the gun. She repeated this process a few times, the rhythmic clicking of the magazine being ejected and loaded over and over again barely being heard over the rushing water and the very faint, persistent ringing in her ears.

She had read Moby-Dick in response to her mother's insistence that she do so, her mother presumably wanting her to take advantage of her very high reading level despite her somewhat young age. She had read the book in full, but had found it for the most part to be fairly boring, since the actually interesting parts of the story involving Captain Ahab and the whale were few and far between compared to the detailed descriptions on how to determine which fishes were whales, something that she had found to be briefly amusing due to her being armed with the knowledge that whales were actually mammals, but only briefly.

After a few more repetitions of the process of unloading and reloading her weapon she eventually stopped, examining the gun in her hands briefly before wandering towards her bag and sitting next to it. She dug through the contents a bit before pulling out one of her pilfered water bottles, one that had been marked with a distinctive black dot on the cap. Upon seeing the mark she frowned, silently placing it back inside and pulling out a different, unmarked water bottle. She greedily guzzled down the contents in one fell swoop, licking her lips as the plastic of the now empty bottle crinkled softly in her hand, before she haphazardly tossed it back inside the bag.

Despite her overall lack of enjoyment reading Moby-Dick, something had stuck with her since she had read the novel. Namely, it was the obvious dissonance between her own interpretation of and the author's interpretation of the titular whale. The text of the novel itself presents the whale as a malicious, almost demonic entity, so pervasive in its evil that even the color that is associated with as an albino whale—white—begins to take on an almost Lovecraftian malevolence of its own. Meanwhile, she had personally seen the whale as being neutral or maybe even good, since it was a wild animal defending itself from being attacked. Indeed, she saw the whalers aboard the Pequod—especially Ahab, something that is also supported by the text itself—as being the real villains of the story and not the whale. Sitting where she was now and thinking it over again, she began to wonder why that dissonance was there; how could she and the author have come to such wildly divergent conclusions based on the same text?

Digging through her bag again, she pulled out her second first aid kit, having been emptied and filled with ammunition and the extra magazine instead. Stuffing her fingers into it, she yanked out a handful of bullets, a few falling out of her grip and landing back in the pile with little metallic plinks. Ejecting the double magazine from the gun once again, she replaced the bullets one by one, before re-inserting the magazine with a distinctive click. She brought her hand up to snap the lid of the first aid kit shut, but instead stared at the contents for a few moments, before grabbing the extra magazine and stuffing it into her pocket.

The solution to her proposed question regarding divergent conclusions was fairly obvious; it was merely a difference in perspective. At the time that Herman Melville had written Moby-Dick, whales were not known to be as intelligent as they were known to be now, instead they were believed have had the same capacity for thought as fish. Marceline, meanwhile, had the benefit of knowing how intelligent whales really were, and saw the whale not as a malicious force of nature but rather as a scared creature acting to defend itself and its kind and ensure their survival in the face of the threat of the whalers. The author had tried so hard to paint the whale as being evil, to get the reader to share the perspective of the whalers, and yet Marceline had erased that vision simply by thinking differently about it. Could that lesson be applied to other situations, she asked?

Pulling out her original, now-slightly-overstuffed first aid kit, Marceline grabbed a roll of gauze and some of the medical tape. Placing the gun down on her lap, she stretched her fingers and examined her bloody forearm before beginning to wrap it in gauze. Around and around her arm the roll went, until it was covered elbow to wrist, then she did the same with the other arm. Securing both ends on both arms with the tape, she returned the first aid kit to her bag, before moving to pick up the gun until something caught her eye, and she stopped. Gingerly, she reached inside her bag with one hand, picking up the razor that she had been gifted by Juliette. Flicking it open, she stared at the blade for several moments, running her fingers through her hair with her free hand, before looking over at the nearby mound.

She had thought of Moby Dick as being neutral or even good, despite the fact that it had been openly aggressive towards any and all whaling vessels, even those that had not actually harmed it or had actually been avoiding it. That fact was one of the main points that the author had used to justify the view of the whale being evil, but she still couldn't see it that way. The existence of the whalers out at sea was an implicit threat against its life. Even if it hadn't been directly defending itself, it was still acting for self-preservation by neutralizing known threats.

Could the same be said for her? She had killed Amelia for the sake of self-preservation, rather than any desire to see her suffer. If anything, taking Amelia's life had been in effect very similar to her slaying that goat for the sake of herself and Roxanne a few days ago. In both cases, a life was ended in order to extend her own. The only differences were that Amelia was human and her friend, and that she had felt and still did feel much worse about killing Amelia than killing the goat. Why was that? Of course part of it had been that she had been sad to lose her friend, but certainly both acts would carry the same moral weight, right? What would make taking Amelia's life worse than taking the goat's life? What intrinsic quality would make Amelia's life inherently more valuable than the goat's, and who's to say the goat didn't deserve to live just as much as any of them?

Looking away from the mound, Marceline pocketed her gun and stood up, moving over to the edge of the river, razor in hand. Sitting next to the riverbank, she stared into the water at her reflection for some time, cocking her head to either side and running her fingers through the locks that were particularly bloodstained and vomit-encrusted. Eventually, she took hold of a particularly nasty bit, and with one quick swipe, the tainted hair fell to the ground. She continued this process, over and over again, grabbing handful after handful of dirty pink hair and cutting it off, bit by bit.

This place was making her rethink everything she had taken for granted before. Were human lives inherently more valuable than the lives of animals? Was any life inherently more deserving of continued existence than any other life? She didn't think that she deserved to live more or less than anything else, there was nothing particularly special or meaningful about her. And yet, tons of creatures had died over the course of her life in order to sustain her existence just with all the meat she had eaten, let alone anything else. She had been choosing, constantly, to kill to sustain her own meaningless existence already, without even realizing. Thus, was it okay for her to apply that logic to other humans, too?

Humans tend to put particular emphasis on the value of the lives of other humans. Moby-Dick itself reflected this with its moral judgement of Captain Ahab. While the novel never presented the man as a bastion of sanity and good morals, and always made his quest for vengeance out to be a pointless endeavor, his worst crime in the author's eyes hadn't been his mass slaughter of whales, but instead had been him choosing not to help the captain of another ship—the Rachel—find its lost crew members, in order to continue hunting Moby Dick. The crime of killing or even not assisting other humans was weighed worse than the crime of killing all other forms of life, even in enormous numbers. She too, had thought the same way, judging others harshly for taking the lives of their peers while not sparing a single thought for the goat.

That wasn't to say she had been wrong to not spare a thought for the goat, but rather that she might have been wrong to spare a thought for Amelia, given that both slayings had possessed the same underlying motivation. Neither the goat, nor Amelia, nor any of her peers deserved to live any more or less than she did, so why not treat all of them as the same? Of course, thinking that way would likely get her branded as being evil by her peers, in the same way she had placed that moral weight on them just a few days prior. That begged the question, however, what did the term "evil" really mean in this context?

Pink trimmings sat around her in a semicircle, the latest few clumps of severed hair currently being whisked away by the current. She sat, gently dusting herself off of any stray hairs still resting on her shoulders and clothes, watching them either drift down onto the moist gravel beneath her or being taken away by the river. Once she finished brushing herself off, she pivoted to staring silently at her reflection on the water's surface, all the while running her fingers through her newly short hair. Her reflection showed choppy and uneven layers, irregular cuts varying in both length and angle, and her newly exposed roots that had already taken on the reddish brown hue of her natural hair color, instead of the artificial pastel pink.

She had been so quick to call others evil, but evil was really a nebulous, broad term that generally meant acting in opposition to a moral code, usually one defined by the speaker. What actions and behaviors qualified as either moral or immoral was inherently arbitrary, and tended to vary between different cultures or even within the same culture in different parts of that culture's history. What was moral would often change as society continued to shift and evolve, and what was unforgivable in the past would often become forgivable in the future. For instance, her own culture used to consider homosexuality an unacceptable sin, and yet in the modern day it was accepted enough that she had barely suffered any discrimination for her own sexuality in Tennessee, of all places. Likewise, geographical differences often came into play. Hindu cultures believed cows to be sacred symbols of life that were not to be harmed, while her own culture often slaughtered them en masse for their meat, something Marceline herself had participated in by eating it. There were even more examples she could think of when it came to those kinds of differences, but she had to ask, were any of these views, past or present, the one true moral code that everyone should abide by? Or were all of them merely patchwork guidelines decided by circumstance rather than any objective truth?

She believed the latter to be reality. That was why Melville had believed Moby Dick to be evil, and why she had not. Morality was defined by people, and it shifted whenever people changed their minds. Even the common thread of not murdering other humans was regularly tested and violated, even into the modern day. For instance, she had previously been more than happy to kill for the sake of righteousness and revenge, without even giving the act a second thought, despite it still being murder. Nations all throughout history often engaged in wars of aggression, senselessly killing combatants and civilians alike in other nations, all while the populaces either actively supported it, or at least turned a blind eye to it. If killing other humans was supposed to be unacceptable, why was there that hypocrisy?

Well, she thought, it had to be because of the social contract, the agreement that everyone within a given society implicitly comes to when they participate in said society in order to maintain order and receive certain social benefits. The lives of people that were not part of a given society, and thus were not part of said society's social contract, simply didn't matter to that society. They were the same to them as the goat and Amelia had been to her, and the whales had been to the whalers. That was why one could, in the same breath, vilify a domestic murderer and praise an offshore soldier. The social contract was the real origin for commonly accepted, subjective morality, the same morality that she had bought into without a second thought, until now. This island, though? Its social contract was defined by the terrorists, and it was simple: kill, or be killed.

Standing up, Marceline sheathed the razor blade before slipping it into her pocket alongside the pistol. She shuffled over to her bag, gravel crunching underneath her feet, before she leaned down and began haphazardly throwing the blanket and dirty clothing inside, zipping the bag up and slinging it over her shoulder shortly thereafter. Her eyes drifted towards the rocky mound once again, her gaze affixed on it. She opened her mouth, as if to say something, only to shut it once more, turning her gaze towards the morning sky.

So, what did this little thought experiment tell her? Well, if no life necessarily deserved to live more or less than any other, and that morality had to change based on perspective and circumstance, and that the social contract here was survival of the fittest, then under the circumstances, wouldn't it be reasonable to strive to continue her own life, by whatever means necessary? Attacking whoever she came across for the threat they could pose to her, the same as the whale had treated the whalers?

It wasn't like she would need to be cruel about it. She didn't need to take active joy in the act of killing, she would just be doing what she had to do. Acting in the absence of morality, rather than acting in opposition to it; amoral, but not immoral. If anything, the best descriptor to give her would be ruthless. After all, ruthlessness was seeing a goal and not letting anything hinder you on the way towards pursuing it. She had a definite endpoint in mind, she had the means to see it through, and she had a promise that she needed to keep.

So, was she evil for what she did to Amelia? Was she evil for thinking the way she was now? Well, that was ultimately up to any hypothetical observer to decide. As for herself, even if the process had hurt, and even if she definitely wouldn't want to repeat it if she didn't have to, considering it in hindsight, she didn't think it had been evil. It just was what it was, and she wasn't about to let herself stop there.

((Returning her gaze to the ground, Marceline marched off into the jungle beyond, her first steps taken on the long road ahead.))