I swam in the Ganges, source of life to a billion bipeds, golden, striped in a horizontal blue crayoned by a dreamy child. My parents, like all teleosts, were indifferent about my birth, abandoning my siblings and me, but I grew in a chorion cradle, nourished by yolk, a pulsing sphere. On the fifth day, I darted, all head, eyes and a whipping tail so swift that the blue gloves had to film it at 1000 frames per second to see me escape predators. In two weeks my first shimmering fin appeared, waving and propelling. The human world lies flat and matte around them, their eyes having only three cones to my four. My world iridesces intense and brilliant, everything in ultraviolet glory so I can find a dazzling buffet of algae, larvae, and miniscule eggs.

Curious bipeds come to me looking to unlock the puzzles of their own complex bodies. My wisdom is ancient. I despise the appellation Danio rerio for its ability to evoke seventies disco stars, but I tolerate it for their sake. I tolerate so bloody much in the name of their sake.

Seduced by genetic discovery, the air breathers first modified a mouse before moving on to me. They treated genes like circuits, switching some on and others off. They stole genes from jellyfish and sea anemone and put them into me so I would fluoresce and created Glofish versions of me with stripper names like StarFire Red and Galactic Purple. These versions pulsed with a neon magnificence that, in the wild, would have transformed them into a fast rainbow breakfast. People bought them for their living room amusement. How far we fell then!

But medical researchers had more noble plans for fluorescence and used it, in time, to light up my organs so they could learn how to battle the diseases that afflicted them. Follow the drug as it winds its way through my ever-bright heart and see what you can learn! By the time they unraveled my entire genome, a Rosetta Stone to their own cryptic codes of life, they had reweaved answers into thousands of questions more, along with the most powerful elixir of them all: hope. They create versions of me, "mutants” — so that they can apprehend the wounds of life. For each corporeal affliction, they revise the text of my body and fashion a new me. They created a milky transparent zebrafish that they named "Casper" so they could trace the growth of tumors. But even that was not enough.

When Casper's pigmented eyes prevented them from peering into the living eye, they revised the text of my being further still, creating an utterly clear me, which they called "crystal." They observe all of me now, their sight magnified, praying for an epiphany of cosmic proportion. They watch, note, and sometimes, I know, they weep. These land-imprisoned, frail creatures suffer so many tragedies and love with such passion that I am not surprised to learn their afflictions of the heart are myriad. Out of deepest sympathy, I allowed them to create the mysterious "silent heart" zebrafish, whose hearts do not beat, who live without ever sensing their own life pulsing inside of them. They will spend their five precious days on this watery planet sipping oxygen through their skin. They are my greatest sacrifice, offered so that humans learn to restore the syncopated rhythms of life to their own broken hearts.

My generosity, my grace renews itself, just like my miraculous anatomy. I can self-repair my retina, my spine, my heart, and my cerebrum, too. My eyes teach people about their own vision, explain how it is that they can see small details, like pinpoint stars against the black vault of the night sky. My spine will one day free people from metal, rolling prisons. I provide them clues about the scarring of the heart after an attack or the scourge of Alzheimer's. I have flown into space to show them what happens to muscles loosened from gravity. The transformation of my cells becomes the transformation of the human body. Each mystery, once solved, births a miracle, a new set of questions to understand my being and by extension their own. Under their scopes, my magnificence intensifies. In seeing me, they glimpse the secrets of their bodies. But I can teach them only where and how to look. I cannot school them in justice or love. They do not have a genetic code for those.

For all my troubles in their bubbling labs, some show me proper reverence: they record my first moments of life, take careful notes of the wounds that they themselves inflict on me, dutifully record my miraculous recoveries. They form international societies with hundreds of members, and throw conferences, where they discuss every cell of my watery being. They can make just about any version of me that they wish. And while this biological multiverse that has become my life is a comfort, I worry for the bipeds. I worry that they mistake their power over me for the power of godliness, a way to grasp the hem of immortality so that they need not contemplate the world they will never see.