Dolphin Warning

So dolphins, as you might know, we don’t have hands, so then how am I writing this you might wonder. Well, I had this human trainee, and after learning his primitive manner of vocalization and rudimentary not nearly squeaky enough language, I taught him a trick that could correspond to each letter of his simplistic human alphabet (how do you get anywhere with only 26 letters is beyond me). For my efforts in training him, he has awarded me much fish, for which I am quite pleased.

Anyway, if anything goes wrong in the story, please blame him for, after all, he is only human. (Give me a fish, no no that isn’t part of the story, just give me a fish!)

So my story starts the same as the story of all dolphins, born into clear blue waters, able to move not in your human two-dimensional ways, but free to go up and down, left and right, as well as many fun combinations of the two. My favorite if you must know is the right vertical tilt donut, try doing that on land biped.

When we are first born, we are not yet able to catch our own fish, and so our mother provides us with her milk. She teaches us how to swim swiftly, how to play playfully, and of course, how to prevent the molten reactor at earth’s core from going critical or burning out. This has long been the job of us ocean dolphins you see, without us, no molten core, no magnetism, no life.
The first thing you should be asking yourself is, well if ocean dolphins do that what do river dolphins do?
Nothing, absolutely nothing.

While we ocean dolphins, eat fish, frolic, look cute, and maintain the earth’s core, river dolphins merely eat fish, frolic, and look cute(if you think pink is a good color for a dolphin, which call me as conservative as a porpoise, but I think it looks undignified). They are dolphins who… how do you say it? Have “gone native” here on earth.

The second question you might be wondering is how it is that we dolphins are the only protectors of the earth’s core. This gets to a bit of a shocker, you see it was dolphins from the coral nebula that terraformed the planet, allowing you bipeds to slowly descend from the trees and eventually build offices and the like. There wasn’t much of an atmosphere and such so we used our supersonic technology in order to start the core and we have been maintaining it ever since.
Before you get excited, no you were not the intention, the creation of another outpost for our infinite empire was. Oh and fish, lots and lots of fish.
Can humans operate the core controls? Well, let me ask you, do humans have knowledge of which corals float and how? Can you create the requisite pressure waves with your tales? Replicate the complexity of a squeak? Can you (apparently your barbaric language has no way of explaining this one, sigh.. just give me a fish).

Anyway, I assure you that you cannot. Unfortunately, we can no longer communicate with our homeworld for the last thousand years or so, our scientists fear our star went super-nova, but there will be no way of knowing until the light hits this rock. We might be the last dolphins in existence the scions of a once-great empire.
Does that imply that we discovered how to travel faster than the speed of light? Well of course, when you properly understand space-time (you guys are getting there! keep it up!) you will realize it is basically all about waves, and who is the best at swimming through waves? That’s right dolphins.

Why not just travel back? An embarrassing business that, you see we forgot the password to our space traveler, someone made a coral sign of it, but too many dolphins moved the coral around to play with so… It could be anything from ecksquakeckeck(higher pitched)squeak to, ahh your language can’t really express the meaning… We have tried constructing a new one, but this planet seems to lack the sonic-malleable substances of our homeworld.

Anyway, the point is we are the only dolphins you have. At first, we thought you humans were pretty cute, exploring, inventing fire, moving about. You were curious and playful, that is why we classified you humans as DLLS dolphin-like land species. But you weren’t happy just playing in nature, you started staying in one place spending all your attention on a few plants, got super serious, started killing each other on large scales (dolphins also have war of course, but we get too easily distracted for them to get too destructive). So you humans became a lot more boring, and we started to mostly ignore you. But then you developed a bit farther than we had intended (we blame the false predictions of the master of the future waves). You developed complex tools, despite the lack of sonic-malleable substances, started to kill us, capture us for your amusement, without the squeak activated tools from our ship, we have been powerless against your opposable thumb tyranny.

Another question?

How do I know all this without the ship? We dolphins don’t need a written language. We keep a long and deep oral history, our squeaks and clicks far exceed the capabilities of any human language. Since we primarily see through sound, we can even send information in the form of echolocation logs so that we can transmit pictures, and even videos of the past, I know the history, for I, like all dolphins, have seen it.

Well aside from those accursed river dolphins, they have long lost the telling.

Anyway, there was a great threat before, you see, you humans are not the only cute thing that we dolphins allowed to evolve too far when we still had the tools to prevent it. There are sharks. What were once cute little wide-eyed fish, with nice soft cartilege instead of the crunchy bones that sometimes gives us a stomachache. They were fun to play with, and we began to eat them less often. But since we lost control of the ship, they have become a dead-eyed menace to dolphins near and far. We swim with yellow-fin tuna, to help guard us against the threat that our former playthings pose. This worked well until humans started targetting our guards, often catching us in the process.  Dolphin leaders convened and a plan of action was formed. We dolphins went around, acting super cute around humans, saving you from sharks, etc. We also made sure that through a series of complex machinations, those humans sympathetic to our cause would be made aware of our plight. Aside from a few Japanese diehards (I suppose they carry a grudge about how shiny and smooth we are), we are now mostly safe from this threat.

But now we face a new threat, a second dolphpocolapse.

We dolphins have many senses, some of which you have no words for. One sense we lack that you humans understand is smell. We haven’t had much use for it you see, and living in pods with no privacy, just ocean, well, let’s just say having too strong a sense of smell can be considered quite rude. But that also means that we cannot smell the pollutants, the chemicals you dump in the water, many of our dolphin brethren have died, others have gone mad. Managing the core takes the work of many dolphins all working in shifts, if this keeps up, it doesn’t bode well for either of our kind.
I send this message, the first direct message from the council of dolphins to humans. We are the only dolphins you have so please, please see that you stop destroying yourselves, okay?
(give me another fish and read that back to me human)