Vance Hollister had spent the last decade studying the origins of water on Earth, but his obsession had begun long before that.
As a child, he was drawn to the vastness of the ocean, mesmerised by the idea that beneath its surface lay entire worlds untouched by human hands.
His fascination only deepened when, during his PhD studies in astrobiology, he stumbled upon a controversial theory.
Water on Earth had not originated here but had arrived from deep space, carried on ancient comets and asteroids from a source no one could trace.
The prevailing theory among geologists was that early Earth had been bombarded by water-rich celestial bodies, icy comets that had melted upon impact, seeding the planet's barren surface with the oceans that now defined it.
But Vance suspected something far stranger lurking beneath the data.
He had found isotope variations in deep-sea samples that didn't match any known extraterrestrial water sources, neither those from cometary bodies nor interstellar ice clouds.
It was as if some of Earth's water came from an origin beyond the reach of conventional science.
Some astrophysicists had speculated about rogue asteroids, fragments of planets long lost to cosmic collisions, carrying the remnants of alien hydrospheres.
But what if those asteroids hadn't just been delivering water?
What if they had been delivering something else, something that had waited longer than life itself?
The question of where it had come from, what forces had shaped it, and whether it carried something more than just molecular structure haunted him.
It suggested water was not inert.
It was an active participant, a vessel, perhaps even an intelligence.
The idea was absurd, yet the data refused to align with anything else.
His predecessors had sought the origins of life in primordial soup, in volcanic vents, in the biochemical dance of amino acids forming proteins.
But what if they had been looking in the wrong place?
What if the true progenitor of consciousness had not been the conditions of early Earth, but something far older, seeded by the celestial bodies that had shaped the planet's surface?
What if water itself had been carrying a dormant message, an echo of something vast and unfathomable, waiting for the right moment to be heard?
What unsettled Vance most was not the idea that water had come from elsewhere, but that it had never truly left.
Every living organism carried it, circulated it, passed it forward, generation after generation.
Not just sustaining life, moving through it.