The ocean started apologizing on a Wednesday.
I was halfway through reheating yesterday’s chowder when the first buoy pinged. It wasn’t unusual — equipment hiccups, rogue currents, barnacle interference. What caught my attention was the rhythm: dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dash-dot….
Morse.
Old habits die hard. I still keep a code sheet taped to the fridge, a souvenir from my early NOAA days, before satellites made men like me mostly decorative. The message spelled SORRY.
I muttered, “For what?” and the microwave dinged as if answering.
Retirement had been my idea, though my department head called it “strategic downsizing.” I consult part-time now, checking data feeds from buoys scattered along the Maine coast. The system runs itself, mostly, but I like to think it appreciates a human witness.
The next morning, another ping. SORRY AGAIN.
I sent a diagnostic request, assuming a frequency overlap from the Coast Guard channel. The server replied clean: no interference detected.
By Friday, the pings had multiplied. They weren’t random; they were conversational. The pattern came from several decommissioned buoys — units I’d deployed twenty years ago. They hadn’t transmitted in over a decade.
The messages shifted tone:
PLEASE. LISTEN.
I poured coffee, black and briny as the sea air, and said to the empty kitchen, “I’m listening.”
I told myself it had to be a prank. Some ham-radio hobbyist with too much time and a flair for the dramatic. I posted on a forum, casual-like, asking if anyone else’s coastal feeds were acting up. The silence that followed felt like an answer.
That night the fog came in heavy, thick enough to muffle the world. I opened the window a crack to hear the buoys calling — long tones drifting over the water.
I TOOK TOO MUCH, they said.
I DON’T KNOW HOW TO GIVE BACK.
I laughed then, a short bark that startled me. “You and me both.”
The fog swallowed the sound.
I drove down to the pier the next day, checking the harbor sensors manually. The air smelled like kelp and gasoline. Fishermen nodded as I passed — men who measured time in tides, not hours.
One of them called out, “You seeing the glow out by Bartlett Reef?”
“Bioluminescence,” I said automatically.
He spat into the water. “Funny. Glows in daylight, too.”
I didn’t answer.
The coordinates lined up with one of the old buoys. The one that had first said sorry.
Back home, I replayed the data. The signal wasn’t simple Morse anymore. It carried harmonics — layers of tone outside normal acoustic range. When I slowed it down, the pattern formed something like a heartbeat.
I should have been excited. Instead I felt tired, the kind of tired that gets behind your ribs and hums.
My ex-wife once said I had two emotions: analysis and avoidance. She wasn’t wrong. But curiosity’s a hell of a drug. I packed my field recorder, rented a dinghy, and headed out before dawn.
The water was calm, deceptive as a mirror. The buoy loomed ahead, orange paint faded to rust, solar light still blinking. I cut the motor and drifted close. The sea was strangely warm — not tropical, but body-temperature.
I tapped the buoy casing. “You wanted me here. Now what?”
The speaker crackled once, then settled into a low hum. Not mechanical. Musical.
Phosphorescence bloomed around the hull, not blue but green-white, swirling in time with the hum. It wasn’t random light. It was pattern — waveforms writ in motion.
For a moment, the ocean looked back at me.
No eyes, no face, just the sense of being regarded — gently, curiously. Like I was a specimen it didn’t quite understand.
Then, through the water, the vibration changed. Words formed not in sound but pressure, a resonance inside my chest.
YOU LISTENED.
I dropped the recorder. It hit the deck with a clatter.
When I came to — yes, came to, because at some point I’d apparently fainted like a Victorian lady — the sky had gone orange-gray. The buoy was silent. My watch said I’d lost forty minutes. The sea looked normal again, except for the faint shimmer beneath the surface, like heat mirage.
I told myself I’d hallucinated. Dehydration, low blood sugar, wishful thinking. I was a scientist, damn it. The ocean doesn’t apologize, and it doesn’t talk back.
Still, I logged the data. Frequency unknown. Amplitude variable. Subjective response: awe, mild panic, gratitude.
The next day I found the recorder washed up on the beach below my house. It was bone-dry, which shouldn’t have been possible. When I played it, there was only static — until the final minute.
A sound rose from the noise, deep and soft, like a whale’s call slowed to human tempo. Then words, barely audible:
YOU’RE PART OF US. ALWAYS WERE.
And then nothing.
I deleted the file. Some truths are better as rumors.
It’s been two weeks since then. The buoys are quiet. The weather reports are boring again. I pretend to be relieved.
Sometimes, though, when the wind hits just right, I hear a tone under the gulls — low, forgiving. I find myself answering without thinking, humming the way I used to when calibrating instruments, before I learned silence wasn’t the same as peace.
I’ve stopped trying to decode it.
I just listen.
Last night I filed my final report. The field labeled Cause of anomaly is blank. The conclusion reads:
Signal resolved. Recommend no further investigation.
I almost signed my name, then added a postscript — not for the agency, but for whoever or whatever reads between lines:
Some questions don’t need answers.
Some things just need listening.
The printer hummed as the page fed through, a perfect, familiar pitch. I caught myself smiling.
“Apology accepted,” I said.
And the sea, patient as always, hummed its agreement.