The sponsoring foundation had repeatedly urged the ship to return as soon as possible, but everyone knew the pressure was coming from the investors. Those bigwigs considered the investment worthless.

No one knew how the girl had come to be under the shelf in the storage room. She looked to be no more than five or six years old, and no matter what they asked her, she would say nothing but her name: T-A-R-A.

Cheeks flushed and body shaking, the girl put no small effort into uttering even that.

Miki recalled when the girl had appeared. It had been the same day the crew witnessed the death of a whale, and having boarded the floating island of the mammal’s corpse, detected large amounts of microplastics inside its body.

It would take 300 years for the particles to degrade, and at current rates, within half a century the entire ocean would be flooded with microplastics. No one cared, though. Even Miki was growing numb to the slowly unfolding tragedy.

Of course, the Akira crew could have called upon the supply ship and helicopter to take the girl away, returning her to shore, but this would only have added to the foundation’s expenses, and no one wanted to invite more scrutiny from them. After conferring with the crew, Miki decided to keep young Tara aboard until their mission was complete.

Not many days later, a polar bear had somehow boarded the ship and, once on deck, torn open one of the ship’s huskies with its sharp claws, spilling warm blood and innards across the deck, before disappearing back out into the floes.

What to do about masses of plastic waste from Hong Kong’s hotel quarantine?

When the crew came upon the scene, Tara was holding entrails in her hands, trying to stuff them back into the dog’s open abdominal cavity. Miki summoned the doctor but no one expected the animal to live.

Covered in blood, Tara put her hand on the dog’s head, as if she were praying. In the bone-chilling wind, a ray of warm light squinted everyone’s eyes. They couldn’t be certain whether it was a reflection from the sea or the floating ice. And then the dog came back to life.

“Virgin Mary!” shouted a crew member, taking off his hat in a confused sense of reverence, despite the cold.

The doctor believed his sutures had saved the dog’s life and did not contradict the known principles of science, but others disagreed, and talk turned to miracles. If the girl could resurrect a dog …

Maybe we should take her to save the coral reef. It was a suggestion seemingly not made in jest.

Three years earlier, the Akira had begun surveying coral-reef communities in the Pacific Ocean. From the Panama Strait to the islands of Japan, from New Zealand to Xiamen, the vessel travelled across 11 time zones, collecting more than 250,000 samples gathered on 2,500 diving operations.

It was discovered that the coral reefs in the Wallis and Futuna Islands, the Solomon Islands, and other individual locations remained intact, but 30 to 90 per cent of reefs in other parts of the sea were bleached and dying on a large scale due to human activity and the acidification of the sea.

BBC’s climate-change series The Green Planet, where plants are the stars

Tara liked to watch the documentary images taken from the ship: blackened seabirds trapped on a mudflat by leaked crude oil, turtles dying after swallowing plastic products, polar bear cubs separated from their parents on melting glaciers, various sea species swept up by fine-eyed fishing nets before they were fully grown.

She would weep, silently at first, but soon her sobs grew to a heart-piercing howl, as if all of the pain and death were taking place inside her own body, and all at once.

Miki was trapped in a maze of puzzles when it came to this girl. When Tara had seen news of the super-rich launching rockets and taking selfies as they floated in space, she’d smiled in disdain, as if they were boys standing on a sand dune about to be submerged by the ocean tide, still competing to see who could pee the farthest.

“They can’t go anywhere,” the girl had concluded, shaking her head.

“What does that mean,” Miki remembered asking herself.

“New ship. It doesn’t move.”

2021 saw record temperatures and more extreme weather in China

As Miki tried to understand the mystery of Tara’s words, news arrived that the foundation’s board planned to divest from the Akira’s reef research, having professed more optimism about the development of space technology, as if in that future of space travel, Earth was a ship to be abandoned. No matter Miki’s arguments, the foundation’s representatives on shore would not be swayed, and she finally gave up, agreeing to return early and let the team disband.

The disappointed crew members hauled out the relevant equipment and began to melt the sea ice that had all but fused with the hull’s steel over these many months. The separation was marked by what sounded like the peeling of frostbitten skin from muscle.

“Tara, we’re leaving now. You can leave the boat and go back to shore,” Miki said sentimentally.

“Tara won’t go!” The girl knocked the guard rail, vibrations reverberating in the Arctic chill. “Tara wants to stay on the sea!”

The Akira, unmoored from its anchor of ice, began its homeward voyage, but the radar showed a number of bright flashing points: unidentified objects in the waters ahead of the ship.

The crew huddled on deck, uneasy and confounded. They were about to witness a grand seance. A dead sperm whale surfaced, as if being reborn, covered in colourful flora and fauna that devoured the body and perhaps even the soul of this former giant. Muscle and fat were broken down by bacteria to become ammonia gases, expanding the body like a nebula and helping the corpse escape the planet’s gravity. It rose slowly, dispelling the waves.

A sustainable-dining advocate’s go-to healthy food places in Hong Kong

In its wake pieces of coral danced, fish and shrimp frolicked, and seaweed entwined to form a mandala. The parents, grandparents and generations of ancestors of these creatures were once the food of this giant whale, passing through its thick, dark oesophagus, stomach and intestines. Now these families were reunited.

“It’s back!” Tara cried, laughing and clapping her hands. “It’s still alive!”

“It’s a whale fall …” Miki murmured to herself. She had never imagined that life and death could coexist so beautifully.

The dead whale was not just a corpse. It had also become a refuge and a paradise for many marine creatures. Each being was a part of a larger collection of life, behind which was the infinite web of existence.

“Tara likes this boat.” The girl pointed into the distance, where the pink sea merged with the golden sky. “Tara won’t leave.”

Should you have kids if you worry about environment, climate change?

All were touched by the girl’s words. The Akira had been trapped in the glacier for too long; the crew had forgotten what it was to like to be able to sail freely.

“We like this boat, too, and …” Miki took a deep breath, as if making a decision. She gently embraced the girl’s little body, so small but so warm, as if an endless energy dwelled inside. Who was she, where had she come from, what did she want – these questions seemed not to matter now. What was important was that Tara had reminded her of a long-forgotten fact. All beings are intertwined, shaping the destiny of this planet now and in the future.

“This is our only ship,” said Miki. “We aren’t going anywhere.”