Her hand slipped again and Izumi realized in a frisson of panic that she was going to die on this godless planet.
She’d landed on a tree root, and dangled over the yawning darkness of the sinkhole. A pungent hot mist rose out of the deep like a beast’s cloying breath. Pulses of putrid steam spiraled up, soaking her sweaty body and slicking her hands. The pain of holding on burned. She’d hurt herself in the fall, perhaps broken something. A deep low rumble below her gave way to a reverberating chime. Within minutes her grip on the dripping tree root would tear way and she’d plummet into the abyss, smashing into pieces in the invisible darkness below. Cooked food for whatever nocturnal life form lurked there and emitted that eerie rumbling and multi-timbral chimes.
Izumi realized that her discovery would go with her: what she thought were “pools” covered in green scum were actually vents from the hot core of the planet, sources of heat, energy and drinkable water in the form of vapour—if not more.
It was her fault for going against Earl’s orders. Her fault for leaving the tent camp of the crash site to explore on her own in the out-of-bounds forest. She just needed to get away from them all. From the incessant whining and complaining.
She hated it and she hated them.
She hated them for how they desperately clung to life’s routine order. Many still foolishly hoped to be rescued. Two months had passed since the crash and they were seriously running out of supplies; no one, except the rare well-armed expedition, ventured out for fear of getting eaten by ferocious hexes—giant six-legged tiger-like scaly predators—or the mysterious killer that lurked in the forest. Colonists searching for drinkable water confined their minor forays to the open meadows and avoided the thick forests that harbored some lightning-fast predator that had already taken two exploration parties.
She hated them for clinging to one another with the glue of useless hope: like naive children finding comfort in holding hands as they marched into the furnaces of Auschwitz. There was no comfort in death, thought Izumi. There was only death. Followed by decay and absorption by an amoral and harsh ecosystem. You just disappeared into the darkness. The end.
***
Izumi had slipped out of camp daily to explore the dangerous forest. Since Patricia’s and Viktor’s exploration parties had disappeared in there, Saz had declared the forest out of bounds. The forest was an anomaly, overly rich with nutrients and diverse flora on an otherwise fairly bleak savanna planet; Izumi felt that in there lay their answer to survival on Mega. Using a RAPSODI™ drone device that she’d stolen from stores, Izumi had mapped a hundred hectare area of rich and diverse forest. She’d instructed the drone to fly a 20 meter high grid over the forest, which she was now ground-truthing. The imagery and her ground-truthing had confirmed the spectacular oddity she’d glimpsed on the planet’s surface as the colony ship plummeted toward it—seconds before the crash. A million tiny “lights” winked at her from what looked like a lit beehive. Earl and Jason told her it must have been the reflection of the nearby star on a series of ponds.
They were probably right. But there was more to it. Her RAPSODI revealed that the forest was riddled with small hexagonal clearings, covered with a film of fluorescent green algae. In some areas they’d aggregated, literally forming a honeycomb. After studying the drone’s readouts, Izumi decided that these open hexagons of fluorescent green might be the key to the colony’s energy and clean water shortage. Those lights were more than reflections, she reasoned.
But convincing Earl to let her use more of their precious instruments to conduct field experiments on the ponds was another matter. Two exploration parties looking for freshwater had already disappeared in the forest. Soon after each party went in, an ominous rumbling sound had echoed in the valley. Then the party disappeared. Everything disappeared with them, including their tracers—which were indestructible and whose signals were traceable through anything, even inside a beast’s stomach. It was as if the explorers had winked out of existence through a dimensional door.
Earl had been avoiding her but Izumi finally cornered him outside the food ration tent.
He lashed at her like a trapped animal: “We’ve already lost precious equipment in the crash. Now you want to go out in the forest—after I gave express orders not to—and run tests using the only Hydrolab that works? You never asked if you could use one of the only two functional RAPSODIs. You just took it!” Earl wagged a finger at her as though she were a misbehaving child.
She hated being restricted by someone else’s fear. She felt her mouth tighten with frustration. The idiot was behaving like a greedy miser. After her theft, he’d locked the stores, preventing her from taking the Hydrolab and forcing her to ask for it now. If it was up to him, everything in stores would stay locked up. These things were meant to be used, she reasoned. That’s why they’d brought them here to Mega!
He wasn’t finished though: “Listen, Ohkawa, I like you.” His eyes squinted at her and he scrunched up his face as much as to say that he couldn’t fathom why though. “But you need to get with the group here. Collaborate with the team. We do things in reasonable time, keeping safety in mind. Those hexes are dangerous and the forest is harboring something even worse; we can’t afford to lose more people. We have to figure things out before we lose the entire colony. You’re a rogue. That’s dangerous.”
She wanted to tell him that it was rogue behavior that led to her discovery of water’s phase coherence communication on Mars. Instead, she muttered, “Rogue thought helps figure things out—“
“That’s not the point,” he cut in sharply. “The point is we’re a team here and if we’re going to survive we need to act like a team. You’re a great scientist and all, but you’re too much out there on your own. Disobeying orders.” He shook his head at her. “Chaos, Ohkawa, we’ve already lost four people in that forest. We have no idea what took them, but whatever it was, it’s at least as fast as that hex and equally lethal…Maybe the mother of hexes…or worse. No one had a chance to even call us on their communicator before they got taken…”
She remembered the first casualty. Only half an hour had passed since Patricia and Stan had penetrated the forest when a terrifying deep alien “roar” and crashing trees silenced the entire camp with a pall of terror. Izumi saw it in their faces; the expectation that some huge behemoth would emerge from the forest and finish off the camp. But nothing followed the silence. Except that clouds rose over the forest like steam and soon after it rained.
“…Then you go deep into the forest—”
“Not deep, just on the edge; RAPSODI went deep.”
“…you go into the forest…You slip out of camp without telling anyone and sneak back without telling anyone you’re back—”
“I’ve got my tracer—”
“You mean like the ones that keep disappearing?” he retorted.
Izumi frowned and studied her worn boots for a moment.
“…We can’t afford that attitude,” Earl went on. “That kind of attitude kills people, Izumi.” She preferred it when he used her surname. She raised a finger and opened her mouth to speak, but he drilled on, “You seem to care more for your data than the people you’re trying to help.”
She swallowed hard and felt her heart race with the truth.
He leaned forward with a smirking frown and she fought from recoiling. “And what happens if you don’t come back?” He arched a brow. “A hex snags you or you fall and break a leg and that forest thing ‘disappears’ you. We lose yet another RAPSODI…and the only Hydrolab we have…”
The asshole. Now who wasn’t thinking of others? She set her jaw and straightened, trying to meet his height. He was a tall son of a bitch.
She cleared her throat to speak but he wasn’t finished; he’d saved the best for last: “I told them not to put you on the mission.” She’d suspected that. “…It was too early after your…well…” He shrugged then pursed his lips. “If you weren’t so obsessed with your science, maybe you wouldn’t be a widow now—”
She wanted to slap him. Instead she clenched her hands by her side and cut in, voice warbling, “If those ponds are what I think they are, we’ll have infinite stores of drinkable energized water as well as a source of energy and light to compensate a million times over.”
He crossed his arms and frowned with skepticism.
She drew in a long breath and continued, “RAPSODI’s seismic readings suggest that each of those pools is at least as deep as Lake Baikal. And there are scores of them; plus they’re heated.” Her voice had risen with excitement and she realized that she was affirming some of what he’d accused her of.
He shifted his feet, impatient.
She pushed on, “The film and the vapor cloud above them are remarkable, Earl. The vapor cloud over each of these ponds is a ripe mix of oils and water vapor that demonstrates birefringence; that might explain some of the odd optical phenomena some of your crew have been observing by the creeks.”
His eyes started to glaze over.
Asshole, she thought. She drilled out faster, “Initial drone scans suggest that this water is sweet—not like the contaminated saltwater of the streams and probably the lake. I think it’s drinkable! We need water, Earl. The readings suggest a high nutrient content and some interesting anomalous properties in the algae on the surface. They give off light under certain conditions. And they’re made of high proteins and fibers, Earl!”
His eyes kept darting away, as if he was looking for an escape.
“But we need to get in there with the Hydrolab,” she continued, hearing her voice go shrill. “We need to sample for palatability, confirm structure and behavior and measure the BTUs generated and why they give light sometimes and not other times…” She trailed off.
He’d rudely turned his back on her to talk to another technician about toilet facilities. Waving his hand at her in a dismissive gesture, Earl glanced back at her over his shoulder and quipped, “Write it up in a report and give it to Saz—Bill’s on an expedition now to the lake; we’ll set up a committee to look into it when they get back.” Then he abandoned her in the middle of the compound and steered the young technician toward the toilets without looking back.
God damned asshole!
She was on her own for resources. Izumi sighed and gazed up at Mega’s ring—the reason they’d crashed. It cut a jagged line of glowing amber against the blue sky. She sighed and wandered the camp aimlessly, letting thoughts and memories surge in like an ocean’s endless surf.
Back on Earth, she’d studied bioluminescence in algae and had determined an energy relationship with water vortices. Her work led to the Mars mission with Doctor Kurt Weisenbaum, an independent researcher with the ESA. They worked in Gale Crater where a massive ancient sea had once teamed with exotic algae and other life forms.
Her research with epitaxy and frequency had revealed that water worked like a quantum computer. Under certain circumstances, water self-organized and displayed quantum coherence. Through its hexagonal crystalline structure, water stored “memory” and communicated over vast distances—instantly.
Water was quantum entangled.
Algae, both connected and directly energized by structured water, featured critically as both Martian food and energy source. She and Weisenbaum published a paper in Nature outlining a new theory on the role of water coherence, fueled by planetary frequency, to form and sustain unique life. Despite the paper’s suggestion that the mechanism was a form of communication, Weisenbaum refused to take the next obvious step: to explore intent and planetary intelligence. He’d accused her of being a hopeless romantic: “Still looking for the God particle, Izumi? There is no meaning and no God. There’s only existence; and science to explain it, of course.”
Izumi sat down at a makeshift table on the edge of the camp with a view of the turquoise grassland. A herd of yellow oval-bodied herbivores roamed lazily, feeding. They were totally unaware—or unconcerned—about a pair of hexes she spotted in the far distance. The huge beasts were sunning themselves on a large rocky hill that overlooked the meadow. They were obviously sated—for now.
Izumi checked the TIDI™ on her wrist and reviewed the images of the ‘honeycomb’ pools from her drones. There was something strange and utterly wonderful about this network of hexagonal pools, whose steaming mists of faint green vapor enveloped the lush forests in a mysterious gossamer web. Was it just a coincidence that the uber-predators—the hexes—also had six legs and hexagonally shaped scales or that most of the vegetation was configured in multiples of threes and sixes?
Mega wasn’t unique in the universe for this, thought Izumi. During her early studies in exo-fluid dynamics, she’d explored the persistent hexagonal cloud pattern over Saturn’s north pole, a result of severe velocity gradients surrounding a turbulent cyclone—and a signature of Saturn’s unique frequencies. Earth also featured many hexagonal structures.
She summoned images of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, basalt columns formed in a Palaeocene lava flow, where she’d taken Albert on their honeymoon. The causeway led them to Fingal’s Cave, a melodious sea cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa. Fingal’s otherworldly song echoed throughout the cathedral-like chamber, a combination of chortling waves and something else. Struck by its moaning beauty, they’d stripped and lay on one of the basaltic hexagons then gave themselves to its love-dance. Nine months later Daiki was born.
Izumi drew in a halting breath and considered how the hexagonal shape was common in organic chemistry. It provided a naturally strong and resilient structure when stacked, like graphite. Diamond and quartz crystals, epithelial cells in the eye and of course the snowflake were good examples of the natural hexagon on Earth. So was the honeycomb structure of a beehive.
Occultists suggested that the number six symbolized love, communication, balance and union.
And family…
***
The recruiter shuffled his papers methodically before lifting his head to gaze directly at her. “So, Ms. Ohkawa, you have no currently living relatives?” his face was deadpan. Although they never admitted it, she knew the recruiters preferred candidates with no attachments. It made leaving Earth simpler. Less complicated. New beginnings and all that shit. Nothing left behind. Only, everyone left something behind. Then took those ghosts with them.
She cleared her throat and swallowed. “None,” she said in a hoarse voice. “All dead.”
He glanced back down at his papers. No doubt it was all there in front of him. Her parents had died in a car crash when she was five. She lost her older sister and aunt to the Asian Plague when she was seventeen. Then there was the accident a few months ago on Mars that took the lives of Albert and Daiki, and by some freak left her untouched. Albert hated flying; but he’d braved the trip to see her. Rather than interrupt her critical studies on Martian life-generation, she’d arranged a special pass for them to travel the dangerous terrain to where she was stationed so she could continue her work. Only they never arrived; a freak electro-magnetic storm crashed the ship and they perished. If she’d taken the shuttle to meet them, she would have met the same fate. Her husband and son had been casualties of her obsession with life. Lack of compassion had saved her life while condemning theirs. If she hadn’t insisted on continuing her work on Mars, forcing them to come to her, Albert and Daiki would still be alive.
When the recruiter finally looked up again, his eyes softened. That look found its way past her barrier like no sword could and pierced her heart. She swallowed hard and fought the tears stinging her eyes. She preferred his deadpan expression.
When the pastor had sat down with her at the funeral, he’d said, “We can’t expect to know the ways of God, what God intends for us. You were spared for some reason that only God knows.” He thought he was comforting her; but instead he was torturing her.
Three months later, she was sitting here in the IASA recruiting office. Because of her research on Martian planktonic energy, water epitaxy and vortices, they had pre-selected her as one of their exo-biologists on the Mega-mission. She’d grabbed it.
***
Izumi picked her way through the soggy forest, dominated by hexagonal-scaled trees.
“Magnetic-Electro-Gravitational-Anomaly. That spells MEGA,” Izumi said to RAPSODI™, the recording-measuring drone resting on her shoulders like a miniature backpack. “We still don’t know what causes the anomaly,” she continued. “But that’s why we’re here.”
“That’s right, Izumi,” the drone droned.
They’d come here because Mega was a Goldilocks planet; it had water and obviously supported life; rich life, albeit primitive and unfriendly. When she’d read about what the probes had revealed, she remembered smiling. Mega possessed some very intriguing properties. Its diameter and mass was larger than Earth, yet its gravity was slightly less than Earth’s—suggesting a lower density and fewer heavy metals like iron. Its global electromagnetic field on the other hand was sizable and fluctuated synchronously over the seasons, accompanied by spectacular auroras. As if it was self-organized. What was producing it and what orchestrated its synchronous dance? There was something missing from the Mega picture, she thought. Something they weren’t getting.
Feeling suddenly spooked and disoriented, Izumi hastily scanned her surroundings. The hair on the back of her neck rose up and she felt her breaths grow shallow. It felt like someone was watching her. There was nothing there; no movement, no rustles beyond the regular sounds of small creatures and the wind through the leaves. Yet she felt something there.
Shaking off the queasy feeling, Izumi checked the GPS reading on the TIDI strapped to her wrist and gazed around her, noting the triangular branches of the trees that curved away from the thick trunks. Maroon leaves hung off the branches like large rhomboid panels, resembling colored glass. They gave off a sweet aroma edged with the smell of sawdust. Some kind of filigreed purple fern and low undergrowth with triangular leaves and juicy deep purple berries covered the ground in a soft carpet that squished under her feet. She glanced down to where her boots sank into the spongy undergrowth, creating little pools. It was awfully wet here, she thought, inhaling the hint of rotten eggs in the humid air. Why was the forest so rich in nutrients, thought Izumi. The meadows and savannas toward the lake were bleak in comparison. What process could be at work?
Izumi glanced at her GPS again. She was covering new ground. She’d never been this far in the forest before. “Today, we’re heading for P-9,” she said to RAPSODI, “where we’ll take our first algal and water sample.” She paused to look around her then added, “the old fashioned way.” She’d failed to secure the Hyrdolab but that wouldn’t stop her; she’d take the samples by hand and bring them to the Hydrolab back at camp. She’d only be able to take surface samples but that would be a good start.
Izumi picked her way beside a small meandering creek toward scum pond P-9. She glanced down at the clear water burbling over the coarse stream bed; the water looked deceptively fresh and inviting. To everyone’s chagrin, all the surface water they’d encountered so far had turned out to be undrinkable; it was briny, very hard with traces of selenium and dithiocarbamates. They only had one ORMUS™ Vortexer that worked. Not nearly enough for a large colony in need of healthy drinking water.
Just as she struck away from the creek, the sun winked out briefly and something flew overhead with a squawk. Startled, Izumi shrank down and stumbled into a crouch. She gazed up through the dense canopy. The bird-like creature easily spanned ten meters across. Six iridescent wings whirred like a giant helicopter. Still crouched, she watched it disappear to the west as the normal sounds of the forest returned. Things were big around here. Then she realized that she’d hollowed a pool with her weight. Something made her cup the water that had pooled around her and take a sip. It was almost fresh! She stood up with a grin and gazed at her surroundings again. The vegetation had eased into another dominant form.
The trees had thinned out and several had fallen. The purple ferns had given way to a low thick ground cover of olive and pink bryophyte-like vegetation. She stared. The leaves resembled the lips of open mouths. She bent down to get a closer look: they looked like they were all moving—
A low reverberating rumble made her freeze. It was more like a vibration she felt than a sound she heard. The pitch escalated and grew louder, resonating through her stomach and making her nauseous. The eerie multi-timbral chorus seemed to come from all around her: the deeper tones from the trees; and the higher pitches from … those “lips” on the ground all around her. They were singing! And crawling toward her!
Her heart seized. The predator of the forest wasn’t a hex. Hexes were the alpha predator of Mega. Achieving speeds that would make a cheetah on Earth look slow, they used their set of six legs and streamlined bodies to literally soar in bounding leaps, defying gravity and barely touching the ground before seizing their prey.
These tiny creatures were the ground. And they were swarming her!
Heart pounding in her throat, she dashed away from them in the only direction open to her: toward P-9. Within moments she was scrambling along P-9’s embankment, slick with a layer of settled oily aerosol.
A thousand “mouths” were crawling toward her and—
Her feet slipped. The slime beneath her gave way. She slid with a yelp down the steep embankment toward the pond of fluorescent green.
Then bounced!
It wasn’t a deep pool of scum, but a tensile slimy sheath over a chasm! A kind of shimmering sticky net that held her, suspended. Over what?
The film burst with a pop, releasing a cloying sweet-sulphur stench. She broke through, stomach lurching, and fell into pitch darkness.
Something hard caught her in a wrenching grasp. She scrabbled for purchase and now dangled from it. Some kind of branch or root or lignified vine, she surmised. When her eyes adjusted, she saw that many other “roots”, like the one she clung to, stretched across the gaping fissure of black nothing; they formed a kind of net.
Izumi peered up through a fog of pain into a hole of light, to an alien blue sky tinged with wisps of green cloud, the gas that had vented from the sinkhole.
***
She glanced down into the pitch black vent and found to her surprise that tiny lights flickered below. For a moment, she felt as though she was looking “up” into another universe of stars. And felt inexplicably drawn to it. The hot mist energized her and the pain subsided. Izumi felt a strange calm wash over her. She “heard” rumbling and echoing multi-timbral chimes. They “sang” like an ethereal choir—something just for her, just outside her comprehension, yet felt so deeply, she cried.
RAPSODI chirped and clicked then told her in a droning voice, “There is a great torroidal mass of drinkable freshwater swirling below, Izumi. I register temperatures of 60°C to depths of more than 2,000 meters. The water is circulating in a great vortex of powerful centrifugal and centripetal forces…it’s locked in some kind of stasis… as if waiting—”
“—for me,” she finished, suddenly realizing. It’s waiting for me…
“…the toroid is accompanied by low frequency infrasound of 6 to 18 Hz…” the drone droned on.
Izumi’s heart leapt in a dance. She suddenly knew. These were the sounds the colony heard following each of the exploration party’s disappearances. She’d figured it out; periodic vortices of hot water and steam shot up like a hot geyser, attuned to Mega’s hexagonal-frequency and causing the clouds they’d witnessed. The water washed over the forest, creating a temporary igapo and bathed the forest in nutrients and energy. Each event followed an animal’s entrance into the forest depths.
She was overcome with the beauty of it all. This was the dance of life and death to Mega’s music. She finally knew what was missing and what explained Mega’s electromagnetic–gravitational anomaly: Mega was a giant self-organized honeycomb, filled with energized subterranean water that steamed up and occasionally—when a film burst from the weight of a prey—shot up like a geyser, roaring with the infrasound of new life. Energized water flowed over the planet with life-giving energy. The planet took a life and the planet gave life in return. The planet’s core was a giant hydrogen fuel cell. Perhaps a singularity, even. Another dimension, into which Patricia, Stan, Viktor and Benoit had disappeared. Perhaps to be reborn as stars, through a Jetstream of water. What looked like stars below could be entities of light, phosphorescent “beings” of energy, released into Mega’s atmosphere to seed the forest and the land with life. Or was she in fact looking down into another dimension?
What everyone thought was a lightning-fast predator was actually the forest ushering its prey to the sinkholes that, in turn, nourished its thick carpet of “beings” with its regurgitated upwelling. A cooperative ecosystem in tune with itself, intelligent and communicating through infrasound.
She’d found the answer to all of the colony’s needs. The only requirement was that they understand the language of Mega’s frequency. It was all recorded in RAPSODI: unlimited drinking water; hot water and energy; algal food and more. The promise of a good life through cooperation.
Only one problem: Izumi realized that she couldn’t free RAPSODI for its flight back to camp and hang on to the tree root at the same time. In that same moment, she felt a sudden calm wash over her. It was as though the hot mist spoke to her in soothing notes. Memories of all those she’d loved embraced her with the warmth of hope. She remembered Fingal’s Cave and knew that the darkness wasn’t the end; it was just the beginning.
She let go of the vine to free RAPSODI for its journey home. “Return to camp, RAPSODI, and report our findings!” she instructed the drone. She felt herself slip off the vine as the drone hovered briefly then shot away.
Izumi smiled, imagining the comfort of holding hands with her son and her husband. Then plummeted into the lights of darkness below.
This story previously appeared in Megan Survival Anthology, 2017.
Edited by Marie Ginga
————————————
Author’s notes:
Birefringenceis commonly found in mineral crystals that have two distinct indices of refraction; this is an optical property of a material whose refractive index depends on the polarization and propagation direction of light. These optically anistotropic materials are described as birefringent or birefractive.
Earlis in charge of stores
Epitaxyis the transfer of atomic structural information from the surface of one material to a liquid—without the transfer of any of that material. Used in nanotechnology and semiconductor fabrication.
ESAstands for “European Space Agency”
IASAstands for “International Aeronautics Space Agency”
Infrasound, sometimes referred to as low-frequency sound, is sound that is lower in frequency than 20 Hz, the “normal” limit of human hearing. Hearing becomes gradually less sensitive as frequency decreases, so for humans to perceive infrasound, the sound pressure must be sufficiently high and is described more as a vibration or rumble that is felt. Infrasound is used by elephants and whales to communicate. The University of Hawaii (Infrasound laboratory) and others (e.g., US military) have demonstrated that infrasound can evoke profound psychological and physical effects on humans and other animals. Humans exposed to various infrasound frequencies have reported disorientation, nausea, fear, panic, sorrow, loss of bowels, drowsiness, visual hallucinations, chills, high blood pressure, increased blood flow and respiratory problems.
Magnetic-Electro-Gravitational-Anomalyof Mega refers to how it defies Newtonian classical physics regarding gravity, mass and global electromagnetism. This is because the planet is essentially a self-organized “honeycomb” with a mysterious link to another dimensional time-space at its core.
ORMUS™ Vortexeris a water purifier that works on the principle of filtration and succusion to reduce impurities and toxins and balance water’s chemical and physical properties for human consumption.
RAPSODI™stands for “Recording and Precision Sampling Optical Drone Intelligence”; it is an AI device that can fly, suspend, sample, record sound, visual and other data and can be programmed to interact in a number of ways. Developed by IASA for exo-studies.
Structured (hexagonal) wateris a term that describes the most stable structure of liquid water as a crystalline geometric structure formed by eight organized water molecules (the Star Tetrahedron or Kepler’s Star). From a profile view its form is in the shape of a hexagon. This geometry is considered to produce an effect called ‘molecular coherence’. Molecular coherence amplifies water’s natural abilities to archive and transfer information, similar to quartz crystals used in computers and watches.
TIDI™(Tiny Integrated Data & Images) is a mini-holo computer worn on your wrist like a watch.
NINA MUNTEANU is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit Nina Munteanu for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water" was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book "Water Is…" by Pixl Press(Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.