Much of what you will read about in this novel is based on real science. The deep sea is mostly an undiscovered place, full of diverse and extremely unusual life. While mankind has spent trillions to explore the universe, there’s still so much we don’t understand right here in our oceans. Our oceans are overfished, polluted, and taken for granted. I’m a scuba diver, and I can tell you firsthand that I’ve seen evidence of man on almost every dive, no matter how remote the location. I hope you enjoy this story enough to become curious about our endangered oceans and the deep-sea life herein, and go on to do some research on your own. We all need to be aware of the destruction of the world’s reef ecosystems and the growth of what is known as the “ocean gyre garbage patches”—vast mini-continents of floating plastic trash. The future of the ocean depends on all of us.