WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA—After drifting on the ocean’s currents for six million years, a disembodied brain, the only of its species, was mortally wounded by the propeller of a passing motorboat.

The brain, whose vast and immeasurable intellect had grappled with the absurdity of being since long before the human race became self-aware, was borne volitionless from the Gulf of Mexico, where it had eddied for several years, to the east coast of Florida, where it was eventually hit by the propeller of a 300-hp Mercury Verado outboard motor.

Devoid of motor function and extremely limited in its sensory perception, the brain was unable to prevent the collision, which represented its first and only contact with another being capable of abstract thought.

The longevity of the brain has not been explained, though it had no natural predators and appears to have entered the world fully-formed, destined to endure, unmolested and undetected by passing marine life. It spent most of its six million years in the deepest abysses of the ocean, lost in the solitude of its singular consciousness. Only the propeller blades of a Fountain 38 Sportfish LX pierced the isolation of the brain’s cold and lonely existence.

The collision shattered the brain into a thousand lesser minds, each incapable of comprehending the atrocity which befell it or the immensity of its loss. Dying alone in the swiftly disintegrating husk of the peerless brain, these fragmented, ruined minds winked out of existence, brutally shorn from six million years of darkness by an instant of agony.

The Sportfish LX cruised on, a spot of white on an azure sea.