Eighty percent of animals between 200 and 1,000 meters deep make their own light. Bioluminescence may be the most common form of communication on the planet. We miss it because we live above the line where it matters.
A deep-sea shrimp has proteins that distinguish its own glow from the glow of others. From the surface, all bioluminescence looks the same — blue, brief, small. From inside the shrimp, the difference between self and not-self is the difference between language and noise.
Four people in a capsule called Integrity are falling toward the moon. The comet is either sublimating into a tail bright enough for daylight or it’s already dust. A conch shell waited ninety years in the wrong drawer. A tardigrade compressed into nothing. A tanker waited for clearance. A worm descended beneath the bottom.
Everything that transited something tonight made its own light — even if the light was just the glow of being consumed.