‘Why are you walking with me?’ Your question drips with anger.

‘Because I’m curious of what you are.’

‘I’m human!’

You are lying. Perhaps without even knowing it, but you’re not telling the truth. I understand riddles. I recognize the correct answers even if I don’t know them. When you answer my question, my puzzle, I know, with the wisdom of a centuries-old rusalka, that it is not the correct answer.

You are not human. Not now.

Once? At one time I was human too. A long time ago when the world was larger. When travelling by cart to the nearest city took a whole day. When anything farther had no meaning. Somewhere there lived kings and emperors. Great markets stood in huge squares I couldn’t even imagine, just as I couldn’t comprehend the sea. I was born in a world in which we all had mortal bodies. There was no Internet, not to mention its successor—Okean, filled with human consciousness—there were no dust-like t-hex scattered across Earth and no storms with aquamarine lightning. Many things have changed since the day I was born and even more since the day I died.

‘No, you’re not,’ I reply.

You press ahead on a road that hasn’t been used for centuries. You seem like you know where you’re going, but I think you really don’t. At the end of that road there’s a city. I’ve never been there but one of the clouders told me about it when he stumbled upon the pitiful remnants of what used to be my brook. He said that there were people there and that he looked after them. For half a century he has redirected the worst storms and brought ordinary rain. One that leaves regular puddles. But do you know about that?

All of a sudden you swing around and roar at me:

‘Stop it!’

You look at me. Your face is beautiful. In my days people weren’t so beautiful and so I was made prettier through death—it transformed my body. But telling you this won’t quench your rage.

‘Why are you doing this to me? Why are you taunting me? What kind of experiment is this?’

I’ve already told you four times that I’m not an Okeanian. That my green hair is not configured t-hex and that my knowledge does not come from the wisdom of the billions of databases. But you don’t believe me. It’s easier to think of me as a cruel post-human who toys with you. You who are a human in a mortal body, a real human, created by the evolution and not how he designed himself. It’s easier than to acknowledge that I’m a water sprite, a creature from beliefs you disowned long before the climate catastrophe destroyed the world; before the Wave flooded the globe and the aquamarine lightning; before you created the Okean—the virtual asylum where humans sought escape for days, hours, years, until many of you abandoned your mortal bodies and stayed your entire grown up lives.

‘It isn’t the experiment,’ I repeat. ‘I am not who you take me for.’

You snort, turn and push on with even greater determination and I still don’t know what you are.

I need to learn the answer. It’s funny because it used to be me who created riddles and captured those who couldn’t solve them.

We leave prints on the finely powdered ground. Until the wind comes, they’ll be visible to anyone. Which means no one at all— ordinary humans rarely leave their homes in the constellations, enclosed as they are in their aquariums, and the Okeanians appear wherever they want. I sometimes see them in the wasteland. One moment there’s nothing there, the next they come out of a swirl of t-hex dust, so human looking they are indistinguishable from real humans

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