What the numbers look like from the water

I count reef fish. That's the short version of what I do. The longer version involves transect methodology, temperature logging, and a lot of time in the water between Kaneohe and Hanauma, and a spreadsheet that has been losing columns since I started in 2014. The speculative fiction started because I kept thinking about what the reef looks like in 2060 under the various scenario projections I work with, and who is living around it. Not the reef as ecology, which I can model with some confidence. The people. The communities. The fishing practices that have survived and the ones that haven't. I grew up in Kailua and my grandfather fished Kāneʻohe Bay before the residential expansion changed the watershed. The stories about what that bay was like in 1960 are different from everything I measure. I write speculative fiction about Pacific futures that take both the science and the cultural specificity seriously. This is harder than it sounds. I've had three short stories published in small SF venues, one in *Clarkesworld* in 2023, and I'm building toward a novella set in the Hawaiian archipelago in the 2080s. I write in the evenings in my apartment in Mānoa, usually with the windows open. The sound of the Manoa Stream carries.