Mifrah and her friends were enjoying their tour on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean. They were close to an island where they had to stop for lunch.

Mifrah stood on the deck against the strong winds on the boat. Her scarf flew with the wind, which made her feel like a superhero. On the other hand, Haya was vomiting the whole time. She couldn’t wait to get off the boat because she had been getting a feeling sea sick and had a nauseating headache throughout. Meanwhile, Miraal was exploring the old box inside their boat. Haya, still feeling queasy, had settled into a corner, trying to focus on the horizon to ease her nausea.

A few minutes had passed when Miraal suddenly felt something buzzing inside the box. She jumped out of her skin and immediately got away from the box. She felt like there was a bomb that had been activated and was about to explode. She had begun to sweat.

“Hurry! Come here Mifrah! Haya, don’t think of vomiting right now. We are going to die in a few minutes!” Miraal called out to her friends; her voice shaky with fear.

“Don’t be silly! What makes you say that?” asked Mifrah.

“There is something inside the box that’s vibrating and I think it’s a bomb that somebody has activated just now,” Miraal explained while she could hardly hold her breath.

Mifrah was a brave girl. She did not overreact as Miraal did, rather she went to see what was

inside the box. Her mother had taught her that panicking would neither make things easier, nor solve problems.

She lifted her hand down inside the box and searched for that buzzer.

“Stop, don’t, please, it will explode!” Miraal went on screaming, but Mifrah handled the matter sensibly.

Mifrah’s hand touched something that was buzzing inside and she took that out. It was a small metal device that had been activated by some signals. Holding that alien device, Mifrah started to go to the back end of the boat. As soon as she got closer to the end part, the device started vibrating more.

She immediately told the boatman to stop moving the boat forward and go back instead. She signalled the boatman to stop when the buzzing reached its maximum.

“I think there’s something in the water,” Mifrah explained to her friends and the boatman. “We need to investigate, but safely.”

She retrieved her diving gear from her bag, thankful she’d brought it along for their island stop. “I’m going to take a quick look,” she told the others.

Mifrah put on her goggles and snorkel. With a deep breath, she slipped into the Atlantic waters around their boat.

Excited, but trying to stay calm at the same time, Mifrah came up to her boat after a few minutes. Her eyes were wide with excitement as she climbed back onto the boat. She told Miraal and Haya what she had found. It was a voice recorder from an aircraft. She recognised it easily as she had watched a lot of documentaries about airplanes and about plane crashes.

As soon as she held up the voice recorder against that alien device, the extreme vibration confirmed that it was a broken part of the voice recorder. They carried the device and the voice recorder with them back to their homeland.

Mifrah asked Miraal to give it to her father, who worked in the aviation investigation department. The aviation department found out that it was the cockpit voice recorder from the missing airplane that had drowned in the Atlantic Ocean a few months back!

The aviation authority awarded Mifrah because she had helped them solve such a huge mystery of what had caused the airplane crash.

Published in Dawn, Young World, October 19th, 2024