Joey Cloudy online

Isaiah Jones vs the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)

Chapter: Props to U*

The towering 6 foot blonde white Californian dressed in haute couture Christian Dior punk rock ensemble was Penelope Stockard Bedowitz she kept her iPhones camera focused on the 5-foot 5-inch-tall afro puff wearing crimson colored cat eye glasses wearing black girl as a barefoot Aeon Gabriella Zavala wearing her usual faded cut off denim shorts and a teal sports bra lowered the three-foot-long carbon fiber cylinder into the azure waters of the Gulf of Mexico tethered to the stern by the retractable 180-foot-long umbilical. Only a third of the line was extended, allowing the device to follow 60 feet behind the sloop just beneath the surface.

Once it was deployed and descended to the proper depth to be activated the three-foot-long cylindrical canister opened up like a mutant flower as the twisted toroidal shaped carbon fiber petals that were its propeller blades raised themselves from the surface of the cylinder then began to spin in the wake of the Exodus as the wind powered sloop glided along at about 7 knots in relatively calm seas with three-foot waves and the wind at 15 knots from the north east.

What is that thing? Penny asked Aeon as the baby-faced marine biologist adjusted the depth of the device using the remote-control app on her cell phone. The scantily clad marine Blasian woman looked up from where she squatted near the transom at her girlfriend, a smile slowly spread across her round face. Aeon was still laughing because Penny was surprised to find the sunblock she left on board the ship 7 years ago was still here, untouched by Isaiah. Aeon doubted anyone as black as Izzy had ever heard of skin cancer; we are a people literally built to not just survive but thrive in the sun.

“It’s an aquatic turbine; the Afro-puffed girl explained with a grin, an electric generator that helps recharge the ship’s batteries as well as provide power to our electrical systems as she sails. It’s part of why the Exodus is completely self-sufficient at sea. With her built-in water purifiers, solar panels, and wind and sea turbines like this generating power, you never have to return to land to plug into the grid for power or refill your freshwater tanks at port. If your brain is wired like Izzy’s, then there is no reason to go ashore except to buy stuff like toilet paper, fresh fruits, and vegetables.” Aeon added with a shrug and a giggle. The new toilet he’s having installed once we reach the boat shop in Marina Del Rey is made in Japan, a 5k dollar bedit, so I guess you can take toilet paper off of that list. Penny burst out laughing.

Aeon knew why Isaiah immediately returned to the Exodus after the end of the last civil war, living on anchor for most of the last seven years as he solo circumnavigated, rarely coming ashore in his travels. No one else made the connection to the effects the horrors of war wrought on his psyche because of his eidetic memory. His father and grandfather, both veterans of the Marine Corps, understood he needed time alone away from the world to put the demon he set free to fight the war back in the box now that the war was over.

The few photos taken of him by those who encountered him alone at sea were images of a gangly, young black man, torso now covered in Adinkra tribal tattoos carved into his flesh by Twi speaking Asante shaman, (occasionally the dark web posted photos of him on deck in a isolated cove on a Madagascan island nude) or wearing only a sarong or a loincloth straddling a wide board spear fishing in the pacific islands with locals, he befriended in Malaysia, Indonesia, or the Philippines Islands as he island hopped across the South China Sea. For the seven years he was on the US State Department’s terrorist list, none of the islanders he encountered in his travels seemed the least bit interested in turning the boy in to the Americans in order to collect the record 25 million dollar bounty being offered for his capture alive.

Now that he had won his case in the USSC/United States Supreme Court and had his name removed from the terrorist watch list, his company MYC/Monarch Yacht Corporations bank accounts and holdings released, and the 25 million dollar bounty taken off of his head, he returned to the United States for the first time in nearly a decade. He had never done a complete haul out and refit in the seven years he had sailed the Exodus, but once they reached Marina Del Rey in California.

They would pull the ship into a warehouse where they would remove everything but the marine-grade titanium hull and deck before replacing every inch of pipe, wiring, faux marble flooring, and teakwood veneer decking. Izzy’s friends in California owned the racing boat company White Wave Racers. They met on his first trip through the Mediterranean 6 years ago after he passed through the Suez Canal, circling the African continent. Harold and Lydia Chow had run into Isaiah in Cannes and invited him to dinner on board their yacht Odyssey, a 140-foot catamaran. That evening, after several bottles of French wine, they agreed to do the Exodus refit, sealing the deal over a handshake.

Penny sighed, “I’m exhausted. It’s time to get some rest. Good night, my Sea Monkeys.”

With that, Penny wrapped up another day of documenting their voyage from Galveston to Los Angeles, ready to take on whatever tomorrow brings.

Her interviews aboard the infamous in the west, 44-foot sloop the SS Exodus were informal, casual conversations about what her crewmates were working on while they went about their daily tasks. Izzy, the cornrow-wearing bearded captain with his degrees in engineering and physics, and Aeon, the afro-puffed marine biologist, were seasoned sailors from childhood with degrees that enhanced their usefulness at sea. Today, she learned something fascinating: the ship’s brand new 3D printer could be used to make parts for repairs, including new propellers for her drones. Isaiah printed a fresh set of toroidal propeller blades he had designed for her drones. As Penny interviewed him, the camera panned over the drone, its sleek new blades spinning silently. He had picked up the 3D printer when the Exodus docked in the port of Galveston, where Aeon and Penny had boarded 2 days ago.

Cutting to voiceover, she ends the segment with drone footage, magnificent shots of the sea at sunset. Penny gives her usual sign-off just as Mau Mau, her 2-year-old carbon colored 145 pound Cane Corso, hops onto the bunk, photobombing the final shot. Penny chuckles, noting that part of the reason they’re heading to Marina del Rey is to have new propeller and thruster blades installed during a refit in dry dock.

The interviews Penny conducted were relaxed and organic. She was learning as she went on her first long sailing voyage, documenting her experience while crewing. Her parents owned yachts more than three times the size of this mid-sized Solent rigged sloop, but they were operated by hired professional staff of Eastern European peasants; they treated them like Mexican servants since they owned the ship, that is what they were to her and her parents, the white nigger help.

The gigantic vessels they purchased, like Flag from Tommy Hilfiger and Hemisphere from the Russian oligarchs, were floating luxury hotels. She learned nothing about sailing while aboard their fully staffed vessels. Their every need was attended to by the gaunt, servile staff of euro-trash. The job looked exotic on paper, but the truth was these former impoverished Eastern Europeans who staffed the ships were the Mexicans of the Mediterranean, their women flooded the pages of dating apps of the Western world of men looking for white women willing to marry for a green card; they were, in reality, the new niggers of Europe. (example; see the 45th and 47th presidents wife. A former Eastern European sex worker.)

Sailing with Aeon and Izzy was the complete opposite; everyone onboard had to take a shift at the watch while the others ate and rested. Already, they had taught her how to tie her first knots, a cleat hitch so she could secure the ship in harbors, ports, and marinas. Ten years ago, Penny had been the family’s unofficial au pair when Isaiah and his best friend and neighbor, Aeon, were both precocious thirteen-year-olds.

Now, at twenty-eight, she had been Isaiah’s legal advisor for the last seven years, since he at 16 inherited Beaumont Ulysses Johnson’s ship manufacturing company, MYC Monarch Yacht Corporation—the same company that donated and constructed Isaiah’s titanium-hulled solent rigged sloop, the prototype Ti-44 Monarch, for his grant proposal to sail from Galveston to Ghana, retracing the route of the slave ships and their various stops in the Caribbean back to the west coast of Africa. The owner, Beaumont, who was diagnosed with cancer, donated the ship to the young sailor’s project; the old nautical engineer and sailor willed his company to the young engineer and math prodigy, who, despite his young age, he considered a friend.

With all of the chaos surrounding Isaiah’s arrival in Accra Bay, which began when a video filmed aboard his ship with a group of Cuban American teens in Key West went viral within the first week of his voyage, the interest in his rather boring archaeological scholarly journey became the subject of fascination for Black teens across the globe, especially in the U.S. and Africa. The organic nature of the entire Homecoming movement began almost as soon as he reached Africa, and the President of Ghana presented the young sailor with his right-of-return citizenship papers. (Note: The exception to grant US citizens dual citizenship, where all others could only have solo citizenship.)

Now there were millions of black people, the children of the diaspora who, after reading the novelization of his dissertation in the best-selling book “Motherland” or watching the movie filmed by the fourth largest film corporation in the world, the AAC (African Arts and Cinema), comprised of former African Americans working with their African counterparts to take control of the narrative of Blacks in cinema and the arts by removing Western control through funding the African film industry as part of the Africa for Africans programs. The producers of these films hailed from the US, Africa, India, China, and the Middle Eastern oil states.

In the US, the black middle class were amongst the first wave to buy catamarans and sail to Ghana in the first few years of the Homecoming movement as the process of decolonization of the minds of the children of the diaspora spread across the consciousness of Black America. The number one item that gave status went from material items, designer jewelry, exotic cars, and clothing to passports, sailboats, and engineering degrees. It was the money normally spent on purchasing cars by African Americans being redirected to purchasing boats that crippled the American automotive industry.

It became uncool to watch Hollywood movies or read Western literature not created by awakened black writers. The footprint of the colonized mind became apparent in all aspects of the Western world’s culture, media, and education once the black mind awakened.

The logic of the book, the philosophy behind the Homecoming movement, made it clear after objectively studying Western history and literature that Black people would never be treated fairly in the Western world. This undeniable fact was made crystal clear the entire capitalist structure existed on the three-legged stool of colonization, capitalism, and white supremacy; it was an inherently evil, exploitative system that could not sustain itself without the exploitation of labor that used the distraction of racial tensions to keep the ignorant poor white citizens of the U.S. distracted from the fact that the real enemy was class. It would take the Black population dropping from 13% to less than 3% in two generations for the white bread American workers and poor white right-winged trailer trash to finally learn that lesson.

Africa’s foreign investment portfolio grew exponentially, expertly guided by Isaiah’s General Intelligence AI MOTHER, who managed the AUA’s economy with the new nation of 54 countries’ nationalized resources as well as invested heavily in U.S. savings bonds, Western corporate farms, as well as the US for-profit prison system. These investments gave the new nation an economic wedge to be able to affect the US economy by merely threatening to divest. This was a lesson they learned from history. The Smithsonian removed the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the Atomic bomb on Japan, because they had enough investment in the US economy to rattle investors.

Hollywood created the cool Russian super villain after the studios took billions in investments from Russian oligarchs beginning in the ’90s, after the collapse of the USSR. Now, in film, they are the super cool bad guys with high-tech devices and mythical criminal organizations in the John Wick films. The Hollywood zionist propaganda factory now regularly changes the endings and makes edits to appease the Chinese to be able to be played in their theaters and make more money in the largest economy on the planet. The truth was clear; getting reparations would be like getting a loan from a bank, only those who didn’t need it could qualify for a loan. The diaspora learned from history and asked for nothing from the Americans as they quietly sailed away across the Atlantic, returning on their sacred pilgrimage to the Motherland.

The diaspora in Africa were united and thus more powerful politically than they were while still living in the states, being brainwashed into believing in the myth of rugged individualism. Once the mind was freed, they realized their power was working together. The US prison population continued to grow even without African Americans to fill the for-profit prison cells. The police turned on the poor and working-class whites to fill their quotas and fetch fresh bodies for those empty cells. keeping the jails—America’s back door to slavery—operating at an even higher capacity. The US quickly went from number two to number one in the percentage of its population incarcerated, even as the numbers of minorities and immigrants plummeted.

Penny was only six years older than they were; she was working hard to be useful on the ship, learning as much as she could about sailing as she filmed their journey.

Isaiah, the notoriously reclusive, high-functioning autistic captain of the Exodus, preferred numbers and stats to verbal conversations. Today, he was eager to talk about the new propellers. While Penny filmed the conversation on deck, Isaiah explained the new blades he had 3-D printed and compared their 105% boosted efficiency to traditional designs.

Penny asked, “So, what makes these new propellers different from the ones you’d find on most drones or boats?”

Isaiah replied, “The toroidal propellers get their name from their shape—kind of like a torus, which is like a twisted doughnut. But these blades are more than just interesting to look at; they’re partially inspired by the notches and bumps on whale fins. They can more than double the efficiency of regular propellers.”

Penny exclaimed, “Double? That’s huge! So, that means more speed?”

“Exactly,” Isaiah confirmed. “The science of vortices is where I spend most of my research outside of my work on electromagnetism, which is all about using magnetism to make things go fast, and my work in fluid dynamics, which is about making things go faster through gases and liquids—this is the definition of sailing. More speed, better fuel, and battery efficiency. And they make a lot less noise, too. It’s not just the decibels but the key and pitch of the noise, if the old drone prop designs that generated noise in the range that irritated humans like scratching a chalkboard. For drones, that’s a big deal. You know how annoying those buzzing sounds are, right?”

“Oh, definitely. I can’t stand it sometimes,” Penny agreed.

Isaiah continued, “These propellers will change that. Drones could be used for things like deliveries or inspections without bothering people with the noise. They’ve barely changed the design of the propeller since the invention of flight, so this is a huge step forward. The AUA has already constructed factories to produce the 5k lb. propellers used on super tankers and cargo ships, as well as the smaller propellers used on marine engines in civilian boats like the Exodus. As well as aircraft of every size, from commercial and military transports to private planes and helicopters. These new propellers will make the ADF/African Defense Forces aircraft stealthier, faster, and more maneuverable with just a simple change in propeller design.”

As Isaiah dove into the technical details of the propeller’s design. He pulled up diagrams on the screen mounted on the surface of the chart’s table 3D imaging holographic projector, showing Penny how the shape affects the flow of water or air. The camera zoomed in on the propeller, spinning in slow motion, while Isaiah’s voiceover explained:

“Propellers are designed to push fluids and gases—usually air or water—through rotation. They’re like an evolution of the Archimedes screw, a design that dates back to ancient Egypt. But in terms of real innovation, we haven’t seen much change since the Wright brothers’ wooden props from 1903. What I’ve done is combined the two advancements using the work of Professor Frank Fish in the mid-1990s on the hydrodynamics of whale fins and how the notched edges reduce drag and improve lift with these toroidal props.”

Penny laughed, “To me, they look sort of like the infinity symbol or a figure eight, but twisted like a Möbius strip.”

After wrapping up her interview with Isaiah, Penny headed to her bunk. She was impressed not only by Isaiah’s depth of knowledge but also by how much living on a ship forced her to learn new skills. Gearheads like Isaiah thrived in this environment, where constant problem-solving was part of daily life.

Penny reflected in a voiceover, “Out here, you have to be a jack of all trades—master of one, maybe—but always learning something new. Today, I learned about propellers. Tomorrow? Who knows?”

Mau Mau hopped onto the bed again, wagging his tail and barking, as Penny yawned and stretched, delivering her sign-off.

“Alright, my Sea Monkeys. The lanky, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Californian stretched out on her bunk, her neon pink and purple pigtails bouncing on either side of her head as she looked into the camera of her iPhone, putting the finishing touches on the edit of the day’s video log. Until next time, sweetest dreams. This is Bad Penny, signing off.”

The camera faded out as the drone footage rolled once more, the shimmering sea below and the quiet hum of the new toroidal propellers barely audible.

Being the token white girl on the ship was fine, but what she hated was not being useful. Aeon and Isaiah had grown up summering on sailboats in the Caribbean with their parents, and Izzy had just circumnavigated 3 times solo in the last 7 years. Her international contract law and finance degrees were useless onboard ship, but she was beginning to find her place as she documented life crewing aboard the Exodus with her reclusive friend, the math prodigy turned African warlord, the Emperor Jones. Penny smiled. He was still just Izzy, the kid who loved math and sailing, to her, just like he was the day they met, his first day, his first year at SMU, the 13-year-old freshman. Over the last seven years, the beard, the Adinkra Tattoos, and title didn’t change him; he was just Izzy.

-About the author

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, Tx.