A few years ago, the news that inspired this story was all over social media. Obviously, when I learned about the pregnant ray and watched all the videos about ray/shark hybrids and sea creature Jesus, my creative gears started turning.
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At first, it was a joke. Influencers on TikTok had a laugh about how we were either going to end up with a manta ray/shark hybrid, or we would get manta Jesus. There was no downside to either scenario.
Then, the scientists came around with their “well, actually…” and broke down exactly how self-fertilization and self-cloning was possible. They cold-heartedly disproved the manta/shark hybrid.
Then, the internet shifted gears. Nothing the scientists said could stop us from hoping that the second coming of Christ would come in the form of a sea creature.
But none of us stopped to consider the third option.
Even though a shark never could have impregnated a manta ray, we didn’t stop to think that maybe something else could have.
We should not have laughed. We should not have stopped asking questions. Because now we’re paying for it.
When that thing was born…
No one knows how many it killed when it came out of the womb. Its mother was merely one lost soul among hundreds. The loss of human life hasn’t stopped. The authorities haven’t been able to catch the creature.
And now we’ve started asking the right questions. Questions like: What is the father? Was the ray in captivity just an experiment, or the first of many? What is lurking in our oceans right now?
And will it come for us too?
