Content Warning: This section of the book and the guide discusses enslavement and death by suicide.

In an epigraph from Dr. Ha Nguyen’s book, How Oceans Think, she describes the nervous system as an “electrical symphony” (3) built for communication.

In District Three of the Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Trade Zone (HCMATZ), an unidentified woman interviews Lawrence, a former dive-shop owner from the Con Dao archipelago. The woman wears an abglanz identity shield, a permeable digital mask that hides her face behind preprogrammed filters. Lawrence describes when a client died during a shipwreck dive. The man was found dead, trapped in the sunken ship and stripped of his breathing gear. Lawrence thinks the woman may be from DIANIMA, an international tech corporation that recently bought the archipelago and evacuated its residents. Once a prison for political dissidents under various regimes, Con Dao became a sleepy tourist destination. Lawrence lives off the corporation’s compensation package on the mainland and has lost contact with his former assistant, Son. He’s haunted by the feeling that something in the water watched him the day of the wreck. On his way home from the interview, Lawrence is murdered in the streets.