Mário Coelho lives in Portugal and drives a crap car which frequently explodes. He mostly writes SFF with a focus on Weird Fantasy, plus a few forays into literary fiction. When he’s not creating allegories about his sleep paralysis or generalised misanthropy, you can find him obsessing about the eventual death of his cats.
Aaron: We’re here again with the Reckoning Press Podcast. I’m Aaron Kling, audio editor for Reckoning, bringing you a story written by Mario Coelho, and read by Reckoning’s Bernie Jean Schibeling. “We Will Not Dream of Corals” is, at its core, revenge by way of a wish. Coral, a creature which has carried the brunt of climate change for decades, adapts a lifestyle that enables it to work symbiotically with humans and directly target infrastructure perpetuating its destruction. For our reader, Bernie Jean Schiebeling, the central wish of the story is summed up in the lines, “You could have had a good life. […] You could have had time, so much time, to do what you love[….]” Corals, after all, are builders, and in his direct addresses to readers, Coelho asks what future we want to build.
Alone on a lonely beach, Júlia watched the Atlantic Ocean spit out the world’s richest man.
Júlia knew who the man was even before the sea placed the body at her feet. She knelt before him and stared into his empty orbits and sought the corals. She saw none.
“Of course,” she whispered. “They wouldn’t want anything to do with you.”
Now our work begins, she imagined the corals telling her, in their language of loss, the blanched dreams they shared with her every night.
She pulled the body into the sand and took a picture and shared it on her socials. She tagged the media.
“Josiah Burke is dead. This is his body,” she wrote. With a shaking finger, she added, “This is a good thing.” Only a few minutes later did she call the authorities.
The snoopers arrived before the media. The media arrived before the police. Blue sirens swam through a flash flood of phone cameras.
Before Josiah Burke washed ashore on the coast of Portugal, he set out to sea for a bit of peace and quiet. He sailed on his smallest, least luxurious superyacht, the Jaundiced Outlook. A cultured name for a cultured man. A cultured man alone at sea.
“I would feel more comfortable if you took shelter inside, Mr. Burke,” Captain Natua said to the multi-billionaire at the prow.
Dark clouds gathered over the dark waters. Sailors busied in preparation for the coming storm. Rain fell like a promise.
“What kind of car do you drive, captain?” Burke asked.
“A Honda Civic.”
“Gasoline? Diesel?”
“Gasoline.”
“That’s going to get very expensive for you, very soon.”
Natua said nothing. Burke was a pleasant enough man, but Natua hadn’t yet learned how to navigate the meandering, condescending way he spoke to those he saw as inferior. And Burke saw everyone as inferior. It was so natural to him he wasn’t even aware. It wasn’t even malicious.
“What do you make of the reefs?” Burke continued.
“I’m not a marine biologist, sir,” Natua replied. Just about missed it, he thought. He had dropped out of his Biology degree on his fourth year. He had been unable to cope with the dead things in the water. The dives between extinctions.
“I’m not asking for your scientific opinion. I’m asking if you’re happy with what’s happening. A lot of people seem to be.”
A lot of poor people, Natua imagined he meant.
“It’s going to cause a lot of trouble,” Natua said.
Burke didn’t catch his purposeful ambiguity: “You’re goddamn right it will. Like it or not, the world needs fossil fuels. Let’s see how people react when their AC stops working, when gas becomes too expensive, when your electricity bill goes through the roof . . . .” He sighed. “I’m sorry, captain.”
“That’s okay.”
Truth was, Natua indeed was happy, when the news showed the first footage of an oil platform getting overrun by corals. More than happy. He was gleeful almost to the point of mania at the first omen of this beautiful revanchism, this strange phenomenon of oil platforms ‘getting sick with corals’, as one publication had called it.
Sick. As if the inert could get sick with life. Corals making homes in the undersea portions of rigs, making wombs of umbilical connections, sputtering out and out and out, lining pumps, loosening drills, leaning over railings as if to say to other corals undersea, “Look, I breathe, I breathe, I breathe.”
Burke shook his head at the darkening horizon. “They shouldn’t be happy. Because I’m not going to hurt. They are. My life will go on, as it always has. I won’t feel it on my skin. Those people will.”
It was a surprisingly sober thing to hear from the world’s richest man, oil baron and tech bro all in one, but Natua couldn’t help but linger on two simple words: ‘Those people’. Always that separation from others. As if being rich had transformed Burke into something nonhuman. As if he had so much money he didn’t need to eat, shit, love, cum, cry, and dream anymore.
‘Those people’, meaning Natua, and his husband, and their daughters, and these sailors here, braving the wrath of a scorned sea so a butcher in a suit could have some respite from the reporters, the jokes, the jokes on the fucking internet. Pity the world’s richest man. He’s not as loved as he wants to be.
“A storm is brewing,” Burke said, in some mocking accent he probably thought sounded nautical. “What a weird expression. Brewing a storm. Like it’s something a person could make.”
“It is something a person can make,” Natua pointed out, before he could stop himself. We’re brewing them more and more, month after month, he thought. Brewing storms and spilling them all over the shop.
Burke tilted his head. He smiled. “Hm. I guess you’re right.”
He sounded almost proud.
A wave loomed on the horizon. A shadow from sea to sky. Burke faced it, tall and straight, as if he could rise above it.
Júlia had met Vicente at 1.5 degrees of warming, ten years before the corals. They fell in love the way tired people do, slowly and carefully. Vicente had come to Portugal as a teenager, a climate refugee from Cape Verde. He had studied English and German at uni and become a translator, and was now freshly unemployed by LLMs. Júlia was a biochemist researching plastic-eating enzymes. It was going nowhere.
The first time they saw each other, they were both wearing ski masks. They belonged to the same underground activist group, which didn’t embrace the term ‘ecoterrorists’, but didn’t much mind that the media branded them as that either.
The first time they spoke was while monkey wrenching the same golf cart, in a golf course in Coimbra that had been built during a nationwide drought. A ‘hi’ and a ‘hi’, which made them both laugh, while Júlia broke the steering wheel and Vicente slashed the tyres.
The first time Júlia cried in front of Vicente was years later, when the evening news showed images of yet another hurricane in Cape Verde. Drone footage of a thin man wading through chest-high water, looking for his son in a lake of floating bodies.
“How aren’t you angry?” Júlia asked. She didn’t mean it as an accusation, but by then it was easy for Vicente to see it as such. The years had mellowed him, while Júlia had only grown angrier. “It’s your home.”
Vicente pulled her close, as if Júlia was the one who needed support. “I don’t know. I guess I’m too used to it.”
Júlia pulled back. “You can’t be. You can’t ever get used to it. That’s how they win.”
That’s how they win, making you numb. Distilling tragedy in small doses. Filtering it through the liminal light of phone screens. Scroll past burned forests, scroll past record inequality, scroll past floating dead bodies, scroll past the slow corruption of your life, of all life, a planet in perpetual torture, birds thirsting mid-air, toppling in their millions under the trails of private jets.
Scroll past it all. Scroll because there’s nothing you can do, or nothing you want to do, because you’re too tired and overworked and overwhelmed and what does it matter, anyway? What can you do? What can you hope for? You already lost.
(You could have had a good life. You could have worked so much less. You could have ridden electric trams in forested cities. You could have walked in the shade of canopies, birds flying from home to home above your head. You could have breathed clean air. You could have had time, so much time to do what you love, be with who you love, become who you wanted to be.)
Vicente smiled at her, in the half-gloom. “We haven’t lost, Júlia. Not yet. There’s still hope.”
Júlia shivered. It suddenly terrified her how much she loved him, this man who could stand on a sinking ship and say, “I do love a good swim.”
They couldn’t do this to him. She couldn’t bear that they would do this to him.
But he wasn’t wrong. There was hope. Only Júlia did not believe hope and wrath were antithetical. In fact, to her, hope was premised on the idea of fighting back.
Maybe that was why the corals had chosen her, years later.
The first among many.
When you’re rich enough, wealth stops having a practical effect. Your life doesn’t change in any meaningful way between a million and a hundred million in the bank. Life becomes an arcade game. Increase the high score. All about the numbers. The lords of money loved numbers.
These are numbers: In 2017, before the earth achieved 1.5 degrees of warming, fires burned 520 000 hectares of forest in Portugal, nearly 60% of the total burned area in the EU for that year.
These are numbers: 66 people died in total. 47 of those burned to death inside their cars, in a little stretch of road between two little towns nobody ever thought about.
60 km away, a seventeen-year-old Júlia sat at an outdoor café with her friends. In silence, they watched the skies burn to copper. Flakes of ashes landed on her coffee.
(That’s what had radicalised her. Not the numbers—people don’t comprehend numbers—the vision of ash flakes in a coffee, under a sky of rust. And yet she didn’t see herself as a radical. There is nothing radical about human survival. Nor is there anything radical about believing in the worth of the nonhuman.)
These too are numbers: uncountable plants immobile as the flames laced up their stalks. Uncountable little critters cowering in holes in the dirt. Badgers, boars, waterfowls, foxes. Uncountable, unnamed, unmourned.
They are homeless in this world. This world is for people. This world is for people who are good at accruing numbers. Animals can’t count. Animals don’t count.
“Corals release their eggs in perfect synchronicity,” a small, bespectacled scientist was saying on the news. “This occurs due to a confluence of multiple factors, like sea temperature, and even the phases of the moon.”
“But this is different, isn’t it?” the elegant reporter asked him.
“Yes it is. Very different. We don’t know how this species of corals spawned all at the same time, all over the globe. We don’t even know how they survive above the surface. And we definitely don’t know why they’re targeting fossil-fuel infrastructure.”
“Let’s talk about Josiah Burke.”
“Why? It’s been a month. He’s dead. He doesn’t matter.”
The words hung in the air like sacrilege. But the reporter was good. She didn’t miss a beat:
“But some are saying this is because of him. Before his death, the corals only seemed to target oil platforms. Experts are saying this was likely a behaviour of adaptation, because oil rigs make for good artificial reefs. However, the fact that Josiah Burke was the only victim of the storm that hit the Jaundiced Outlook . . . .”
The scientist sighed. “I’m tired of that conspiracy. No, I don’t believe Captain Natua, or any of the sailors, was responsible for the death of Josiah Burke.”
“That’s not what I want to talk about. Although, one of the sailors was found to have been infected with coral polyps . . . .”
“You want the other conspiracy, then.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it’s bioterrorism. First, the corals targeted only offshore oil platforms. Then, after the death of Josiah Burke, they began to spread to the infrastructure of other high-emission industries, even those unrelated to fossil fuels, even those far inland. Like logging stations in the Amazon.”
“What do you think? Do you think these are biochemical attacks by ecoterrorist groups?”
The scientist shrugged. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“It’s certainly more plausible than sentient corals targeting high-emission industries.”
“Sure.”
Finding a dead end in the scientist’s small smile, the reporter changed the subject: “Let’s talk about the economy.”
The scientist laughed. “Of course. Let’s.”
“The IMF has warned of an impending economic crisis, the kind we haven’t seen since The Great Depression. Exxon and Shell are pressuring governments to intervene. Shell estimates that the damages to the fossil fuel industry as a whole are already in the orders—”
“It’s marvellous, isn’t it?”
“Pardon?”
The scientist was all teeth. “It’s marvellous. It’s magical.”
After he got home, the scientist tucked his kids in bed, climbed into the shower, and marvelled at the colours surfacing on the polyps under his skin. They had appeared the night after Júlia Oliveira shared the picture of Josiah Burke. Zooxanthellae swimming alongside his red cells.
“We’ll only be here a while,” he imagined them saying. “Thank you for your hospitality.”
“Stay as long as you want,” he said, smiling as the water fell on him, warm as tropical rain.
The lords of money reacted to their losses the way they always do, by transferring them onto the little people and expecting them to bear it with resignation. They predicted that, at best, there would be a lot of complaining online. Maybe a couple protests here and there. A tiny handout from the odd government.
This was more or less what began to happen. Until Júlia Oliveira shared the picture of Josiah Burke’s corpse, green-hued and sea-buffeted at her feet.
‘This is a good thing.’
The picture was quickly censored. Júlia’s profile was deleted. During the following days, she received many visits from government suits. They carried questions. They somehow sounded both insistent and uninterested. They left cordially and dissatisfied.
She received many visits from company suits, too. They carried demands and promises. Just keep quiet, just do nothing, they said, with so many words and polite smiles. When they try to make you a face of a movement, do nothing, and we will allow you to win this game we are forcing you to play. We will eliminate all quotidian worries. Rent, health, work. Where do you want to work? We can arrange it. You can help people. It will be fulfilling.
To her silence, they pulled out documents. Intimidation written in legalise. We can make sure you never work again. You will lose the game. We will eliminate peace and silence.
It was strange that this faceless force could not see that she was beautifully unimportant. Even if she wanted to, there was nothing she could do. Like coral spawning, the sentiment spread everywhere all at once. The world’s richest man was dead.
It was a good thing.
The day after the death of Josiah Burke, fifteen more oil platforms were reconquered by corals. The week after, Cargill had to cease most of its logging operations in the Amazon after their fleets of trucks sputtered to a stop. Corals were found in the gas tanks. The lords of money counter-attacked with austerity. But this time, the little people fought back. Protests grew like forest fires. The names of fossil-fuel lobbyists were circulated online. Their safe anonymity crumbled. Their homes were vandalised. On the streets, crowds encircled them like injured, but eager predators.
This wasn’t an organised movement with concrete demands. This was chaos, frustration, the abused lashing out. Violence seemed inevitable.
“Violence is necessary,” Júlia said to Vicente, one night, watching on the evening news Molotovs exploding against an SUV.
“Why are you doing this?” Vicente said. Correcting himself: “How are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Don’t play me for a fool, Júlia. I’ve noticed those . . . those things under your skin. And I’ve noticed them in other people, too. Today, the CEO of Exxon was attacked on the street. He’s in critical condition now. Yesterday, you were whispering his name in your sleep.”
There were bags under his eyes and a slur to his speech. While she whispered in her dreams, he was hardly getting any sleep at all. It was not because of the death threats, she sensed, or the resulting, disquieting presence of a cop car outside, for their protection. It was because he thought she was becoming something else. The symbol was overtaking the person.
“The people who attacked him, their leader was like you,” he continued. “The news are saying that . . . there are corals in her body.”
Júlia laughed. “What are you accusing me of? Controlling people with psychic powers?”
Without a word more, Vicente left the room. Júlia could feel she was losing him. But what could she do? Her love for him was endless, but that was all the more reason to fight on. She would rather lose him to a healed world than have him in a diseased future.
Besides, he was wrong. The corals spoke to all who had let them in. She had just been the first to accept them, on that beautiful rainy day under the waters of Albufeira, when she had found a mysterious reef while on a recreational dive.
To the day of her death, it would be the most beautiful thing she would ever see. A fortress of life, schools of fish swimming amid forests of kelp and polyps. When she swam towards it, the corals greeted with an explosion of luminous gametes, like stars whirling in dark space, lighting the way to the shores of a new world.
The lords of money went to war. They took samples of the corals and studied them in high-rise labs with tall windows. They studied ways to murder them. They sent their murderers out to sea. They murdered new and old reefs alike. “Best to be sure,” they meant. “There’s a lot of money at stake here.”
Those who dreamed of the corals shifted in their beds. By now, the dreamers numbered in the hundreds of thousands, all over the world. No one knew how the corals had spread into their bodies.
They are killing us, the corals said to the dreamers, in a dream. Help us.
“How can we help?”
We need only a ride.
Júlia slid out of bed, dreams of dying corals roiling in her head. In the dark, Vicente watched her go. He said nothing.
Júlia got in her small Opel Corsa and drove into the night. She headed out of town. She drove through dark roads. On either side of her, endless eucalyptuses. The lords of money had brought them in a long time ago. Profitable parasites, drying soils and spreading fires. Nothing else lived in there.
Júlia arrived at the refinery of Sines just before dawn. Six other people had arrived before her. Other dreamers. They stood outside the fence, gazing at the labyrinthine structure. Inside, a crowd of security guards. New hires. Men usually amenable to violence, now made timid by the eerie, almost sleepy serenity of the dreamers.
In silence, the dreamers held hands. Their skin began to tingle. Their pores enlarged. Fertilised coral eggs began to emanate from them like pollen. The security guards watched the eggs float over their heads into the refinery.
The cops arrived soon after. They did what the guards could not and took the dreamers away. They locked them in cramped rooms and asked them question after question. They didn’t much seem to care about the answers.
“What’s my crime?” Júlia asked, sitting in handcuffs. “Standing there?”
“I know you,” the cop said. “You’re the woman who shared the picture of Josiah Burke.”
Júlia said nothing.
“Your car was impounded. We’ll let you know when you can come get it.”
“If they can’t charge me for terrorism, they’ll always have illegal parking,” Júlia said, while he uncuffed her.
She took a taxi to the bus station. The driver kept stealing glances at her through the rearview mirror.
“Yes. I’m the woman from the internet,” Júlia said, wearily.
“I don’t go on the internet, miss,” the driver said. “I was just wondering if we could take a detour. You see, there’s a cattle farm not far from here . . . .”
Júlia smiled. The driver smiled back and turned off the meter.
The light of corals flashed under his skin.
All over the world, dreamers headed to the peripheries of coal-fired power stations, petrol-guzzling trucks, hydrofracking rigs. The corals floated out of their bodies. They crawled into crevices in the metal, encumbered hinges and clogged pipes. They preyed on petrochemicals, on pollution. They died as they did it, just to be born again, untiring, undaunted, undefeated.
The eyes never left Júlia, after that day. The eyes in the streets, the eyes in vans with tinted windows, the eyes in her computer, her phone, even her fucking smart fridge. The eyes were just waiting for a glimpse, a confirmation that she was the leader of the movement, a biochemist genius behind weaponised corals.
The eyes distressed her. Not because she was worried for herself, but because Vicente was aware of them too. She could tell he resented her for this. She also knew he would never admit that. Not to her, nor to himself.
She wanted to be out in the streets. She wanted to be more than the face of a faceless movement. She wanted to be more than the patient zero of a beautiful pandemic. The mother of coral dreams.
At night, she shivered with anguish. She couldn’t even ask Vicente for comfort. There was an infinite space between their bodies. He would accept her, if she tried. But she knew he didn’t want her to try.
And then, ever so softly, as her consciousness began to melt, the corals spoke to her.
This will pass, they said. A beautiful tomorrow is waiting for you both.
On the day of his death, Josiah Burke laughed at a gathering storm.
He didn’t know why he was laughing. Or, for that matter, why he was crying.
Natua knocked on his door. Josiah Burke wiped his nose and eyes and straightened his shirt.
“It’s going to hit us directly,” the captain said. Behind him, sailors buzzed about, securing loose objects and turning off electronics and rigging lines.
“What happens now?” Burke asked.
“We can’t outrun it. All we can do is weather it.”
“But how bad is it?”
Natua paused. “It’s a hurricane. A very bad one.”
“Christ, man. Just tell me how worried I should be.”
Natua tightened his mouth. “We should all be worried. Not just you.”
The lords of money had no emotional attachment to oil, or gas, or crypto, or data, or beef. Those were just weapons in their crusade.
Week by week, the corals attacked their revenue, so eventually the lords of money just adapted. They diversified their portfolios and pledged to transition into a greener economy and we’re all in this together.
They walked over a population ravaged by soaring prices, food shortages, stranded in cities with underdeveloped public transportation. But they did it. (What else could they do?) They transitioned into solar, hydro, vegetable proteins. “Fine, you won,” they said. “Now pay us.”
It was better than before.
‘Better’ didn’t cut it anymore. The little people marched on. Overcharging landlords came home to ripped off floorboards, vandalised water lines. There were strikes, by everyone, everywhere. The lords of money tried to bust them, but there were too many. Too many moving bodies. Endless little revolts.
Governments started doing the right thing. Some because they believed in it, most because the alternative was dangerous for them. Working hours were reduced, wages were increased. The victims of technological unemployment, or simply those looking for something meaningful to do, were put to work on humankind’s transition into a green world.
They cleaned beaches. They planted trees. They installed solar panels. They burrowed animal crossings in every little stretch of road. They built railways. They gave freely. Homes and food and time.
Corals began to live in the architecture.
On the day of his death, despite Natua’s insistence that he shelter in his cabin, Josiah Burke went out to see the hurricane. Later, Natua told his husband he thought that must have been how Burke coped with fear. Try to intimidate it, establish dominance, as if the hurricane knew or cared that he was the world’s richest man. As if capital was immortal, unsinkable.
Some of the sailors saw Burke go overboard. They followed procedure, yelling ‘man overboard!’ and pointing at his shape in the water, throwing floating objects after him while the rescuers suited up.
They were all interrogated to exhaustion. But none spoke of what really happened. How Natua was the first to watch Burke fall into the water. How Natua didn’t point. How, for a long time, he just stared at Burke, a tiny figure in the distance, battered by wind and waves.
How he called off the rescue.
They probed Natua, more than anybody else. They scanned each inch of his mind and skin. (They didn’t find a single coral.)
He told the media he had done everything he could. The rescuers had risked their lives to rescue Burke from a sea in storm, but they had been too late.
He told his friends he would never have traded the lives of his crew for a chance at rescuing Burke.
He told his husband, and only his husband, that in the distance, bobbing helpless in the storm, Burke looked like a plastic bottle.
Just trash in the ocean.
Vicente stayed.
“I was wrong,” he said to Júlia, while she worked on their garden, half a year after the death of Josiah Burke. It was a sweltering summer day, the kind Portugal would have to learn how to live with for centuries to come. “I’m sorry, Júlia. I’m so sorry.”
Júlia didn’t look at him. She felt a savage urge to cry. He placed a hand on her shoulder, and she began to sob. He hugged her back as she let it all out, the hurt and the anguish and the wrath, floating away like gametes in a mysterious reef, in a lonely shore, in a day not so long ago.
“Let’s go inside,” he said.
He apologised to her so many times. Her tears dried up and she began to laugh and then she led him to the bedroom, and they made love like everything was alright. Maybe everything would be alright.
There were no eyes on her anymore, except for his.
She would wake to a better tomorrow. Then another, then another, then another.
She would begin to live a good life. She would work so much less. She would ride electric trams in verdant streets. There would be trees all over the city. There would be trees everywhere. Wildlife fleeting below shaded canopies. Everything would be slower. She would forget the smell of exhaust pipes. She would see fireflies again. (She hadn’t seen them since she was a child.)
She would have so much time. So much time for gardening, reading, learning Icelandic, which she had never done before because it was just not profitable. She would begin to learn the unprofitable.
She would spend time with Vicente. She would stop thinking of it as “spending”. She would stop thinking so much. She would start sleeping more, better. She would stop dreaming of corals. They would all stop dreaming of corals.
