Ghosts of Our Children’s Future

The Sargasso Sea had swallowed the horizon.

No line separated water from sky anymore, only a churning expanse of black-green waves, reflecting the swollen bruise of a twilight sun. The last remnants of the old world floated here: shattered satellites, bleached bones, and the ruins of ships that once ferried humanity’s hope.

Elias watched the horizon from the deck of the Aurora’s Wake. He had been sailing west for months, chasing whispers that somewhere beyond the storms and the dead zones, a signal still pulsed.

It was faint, mechanical, and impossibly rhythmic. Some said it was a beacon, still others called it a warning.

The air tasted of brine. Above Elias, the clouds had begun to move in ways that defied reason, spiraling outward like ink in water.

Elias thought he saw faces form within them, shifting, childlike, weeping. He blinked, and the sea’s spray erased them.

He remembered the stories his grandmother told before the tides came: that time was not a straight path but a loop, endlessly devouring itself. Every civilization thought itself the first and the last, but the truth was crueler.

The future was not ahead. It was beneath.

That night, the Aurora’s Wake drifted into fog so thick it muffled even the sound of the sea. The air grew heavy, almost sentient.

Elias turned the dials of his receiver, searching for that familiar pulse of the signal. It came suddenly, strong, deliberate, beating through the static like a mechanical heart.

But then came something new: a voice, small and distant, reciting numbers in a child’s whisper. Elias froze.

“Who’s there?” he whispered.

The numbers stopped, then the voice said, “We are what you left behind.”

The words struck him with the force of memory. He heard them as though spoken by someone he once knew, someone he had failed to save. The static surged, and within it he could almost make out a chorus of faint, overlapping cries of children.

He stumbled to the edge of the deck. The sea below pulsed with phosphorescent light, forming slow, deliberate spirals that echoed the patterns in the clouds.

Shapes moved beneath the surface, thin, luminous silhouettes drifting upward. Elias thought they might be jellyfish until one lifted its face to the surface.

It was a child, or something that remembered being one. Its skin was translucent as glass, its eyes bottomless voids, and when it opened its mouth, no sound emerged, only a ripple that distorted the air like heat.

Elias staggered. The ship groaned as if under immense pressure. From every direction, the water began to glow brighter, revealing dozens, hundreds, of those spectral children, all rising with the tide.

He wanted to believe they were hallucinations, tricks of exhaustion and guilt. But the radio hissed again, and their voices came through clearer this time:

“You built us from your mistakes.”
“You burned the air and buried the sky.”
“Now we dream for you, in the dark.”

The fog thickened until the stars disappeared. Elias could feel his heartbeat syncing with the pulse of the signal.

The Aurora’s Wake was no longer moving. The Sargasso itself seemed to hold it still, an eye closing around him.

He reached for the engine controls, but they no longer responded. Every gauge spun wildly, every compass needle pointed inward.

From the mist above, something vast began to emerge, an outline so immense that his mind refused to comprehend it. It was neither creature nor machine, but the amalgamation of all that was lost: cities, satellites, the ghosts of human ambition coalesced into form.

Its surface shimmered with fragments of memory, faces, buildings, moments of laughter, each appearing and fading like reflections on broken glass. The voice returned, no longer a whisper but a chorus that filled the sea and sky alike.

“We are the children you never dared to meet.”
“We are tomorrow, abandoned at birth.”

Elias fell to his knees as the world tilted. He saw the ocean curling upward, not in waves but in layers, revealing beneath it a second sea, a mirror of the first, filled with those luminous beings drifting toward the surface. They moved with purpose now, reaching toward him with hands that shimmered like starlight.

“Please,” Elias whispered, though he didn’t know if he was begging for mercy or understanding.

“You are already one of us,” they answered. “You have been since the moment you forgot how to hope.”

The sea erupted in silence. The fog collapsed inward, and for one impossible instant, Elias saw the endless cycles of civilizations, each rising and drowning and a sky folding on itself, time eating its tail like a serpent of light.

He saw humanity’s future, barren and shining, echoing endlessly through the void. And within that future, his own reflection, a ghost adrift in the consequence of forgotten promises.

When found months later, the Aurora’s Wake floated empty, its deck coated in a thin film of salt that shimmered faintly in the dark. The logbook ended with a single line, written in a trembling hand recognized as Elias’s, “We are ghosts of our children’s future.”

And now, sometimes, when the fog drifts low across the Sargasso Sea, sailors swear they can still hear the radio pulse, steady, sorrowful, like a heartbeat that refuses to die.