35 THE HAZE

CHAPTER 35 THE HAZE Clickety clickety click! Roz kept clicking, but no echoes had bounced back in nearly a day. There must have been nothing else around. She swam on through the ocean in total darkness, in total emptiness. Our robot had never felt so alone. But she wasn't alone. A gentle current started flowing upward as a glowing haze rose from the depths. The haze was made of countless specks of light, all traveling together. One of the specks passed by Roz's face. She adjusted her vision and saw that it was a tiny glowing creature, no bigger than a grain of sand. A swarm of them was floating through the deep ocean. The robot searched through her computer brain and found words like plankton and bioluminescence. Tiny plants and animals floated throughout the world's oceans, and many of them glowed softly. Roz realized she was never really alone. Living things were everywhere. She simply had to look for them.

The robot continued on, swimming through those points of light like she was in the night sky, and the stars were all around.