A budding young writer has won a competition and her prize includes her story being printed in the Isle of Wight County Press - find it in this week's paper (December 29), in fact.

Penelope Harwood won the Sight for Wight short story competition, in the age eight to 11 years category - netting herself an Amazon voucher, donated by Tesco.

A mystery judge said: "This story has a super opening and ending, with chatty but quite philosophical asides to the reader about time itself.

"There are fantastic futuristic concepts, which are plausible but scary.

"It’s a well-developed story, showing good plot progression with skilled use of language (I liked ‘bamboozled’).

"There are some difficult notions, introduced in a simple but thought provoking way."

Here, you can enjoy Penelope's story:

YEAR 3000 by Penelope Harwood

I was jumping. Jumping into the deep depths of the ocean.

As I began to sink, I grabbed onto Trixie, my five year old dolphin. As we swam down, the water got darker. Darker. Darker. Finally, we arrived at the bottom of the sea floor.

Let me explain, we are in the future…but not for me, for me it’s the present and for other timelines it’s the past.

Wow, this is getting confusing. I’ll stop talking about my timey nonsense. To be honest, not much has changed but we live underwater. This is how…

One day a legendary scientist walked into a lab and came to the conclusion that we could not be superior mammals if we couldn’t go everywhere on the planet. He decided to experiment and find ways we could explore the deepest depths of the unexplored ocean. No-one knew about it because genetic modification has always been dangerous.

One day, while he was taking a blood sample from his arm, he was busted, 2 heavily armed policemen barged into the room. They boomed, “Put your hands up, you’re under arrest”. The bamboozled man did as they said, but in shock he dropped the blood sample!

The professor had tested on himself lots of times, and when the container smashed, the chemicals in his blood evaporated and everyone began to breathe in his experiment. It was a perfect apocalypse situation. Sadly for the scientist, nothing happened. Not yet anyway…

Thanks to the incident, over the years, mankind began to evolve. We became stronger and more resilient than we had before. For example, if someone cut themselves it would heal in minutes instead of days.

This meant people didn’t have to be as careful and humans became more adventurous. Also, because the experiment had enhanced our range of knowledge, we could solve problems more easily, we were smarter.

As time passed it became harder to breathe. Everybody assumed the pollution had worsened, but what we didn’t realise was that we were developing slits on each side of our necks. One day, a man fell off a ferry on the way to work and wasn’t seen for two weeks. All the people on the ferry thought he had drowned. Some marine biologists were examining a coral reef when they saw the man who’d been in the news, unconscious hidden in the reef. With no hesitation they swam him up to land and to their surprise he began to breathe again. It turned out that the whole time he had been able to breathe under the water and hadn’t died. After that, we realised everyone was able to go underwater and breathe.

We had finally evolved past all the other animals. We built an underwater civilisation and started getting pets like dolphins instead of horses and sea horses instead of dogs. Trixie is my pet dolphin.

There, you’re all caught up, we now live happily in our underwater kingdom.