(A photo of a cylindrical three-man deep sea submersible is shown at the top of this article, and it’s dented badly on one side. You can see that the hatch has been ripped open, and beyond the airlock, there is only the gaping maw of darkness. Streams of water can be seen coming from the vehicle as it hangs like a carcass from the thick chains of an industrial crane, pouring out of the dark unseen compartment onto the wooden dock slats below. A shadow of water spreads across the warped wood beneath it, and beyond the submersible, beyond the crane and the chains and the boat is the sea. It curls in the backdrop of liquid fractals and ripples like the vast aeonic darkness of space. Like the accused lusting over the broken remains of his victim.)
At 1:30 pm, Sunday, The Deepsea Meridian emerged from the depths of the Western Pacific. Nine days prior, it was sent on an expedition to one of the deepest known points on Earth. It was to descend to what’s called the Challenger Deep – the deepest part of the Mariana Trench – and launch a smaller remote submersible for the purpose of surveying a newly discovered crevice named the Meridian Line, which could have dropped the Mariana Trench’s current recorded depth of 36,000 feet to somewhere around 50,000. After the Meridian’s surface crew lost contact with the submersible at 12:30 PM on June 25—nine days before its resurfacing—there was little hope that they would find any survivors inside the cramped crew chamber. When the Deepsea Meridian surface crew and the Philippine coast guard finally opened the pressure hatch, a single researcher emerged. And he was alive.
[End of excerpt]
* * *
Evidence item A CN# 24-001387
Victor Rhodey Video Interview #13 [original video recording, pre transcription]
Master: not for distribution, under penalty of law.
August 8, 2023
Begin playback:
(A man sits in an armless lacquered chair at a wooden table of pressed particle board. He’s thin and gaunt: the bones of his clean-shaven face encircle deep shadowy eyes. It’s hard to tell his age. He could be in his late twenties, or early forties. He looks as though he could be someone recovering from a devastating drug addiction: his joints are knobbed and swollen from his ordeal, and his skin is pale blue and veiny. He’s calm, but guarded and insecure, reaching one arm across his body to grasp his own bicep. He compulsively flicks his reddened eyes at the door just out of frame and mindlessly picks at a medical tag around his wrist. There’s another man with him, an older man sitting on the opposite side of the table. The other man is tall and big with a balding head and thick-framed glasses, wearing a white button-up and a lavender necktie. This man is holding a thick manila folder bursting with paperwork.)
“Nine days isn’t that big a deal,” Rhodey says, lost in thought. He turns his head and stares into the wall, chewing his lip. “People have been lost for months at sea, in worse conditions than ours. And they made it through fine.”
“That’s true,” Edgerton says. “But nobody’s ever been lost like that.”
He thinks about that, looking seriously into his hands. “What about coal miners?”
Edgerton smiles, readjusting his glasses. “I guess they’d qualify, wouldn’t they.”
Rhodey ignores him, and then glances down at his hands again. “Part of me feels like I’m still out there,” he laughs nervously. “I know that’s stupid, but. . . I feel like I never really came back—” his smile falls a bit, his eyes going distant and afraid, “—have I come back?”
“Yes you did,” Edgerton says. “You’re right here. Sitting here, talking with me.”
“I know, it’s just…it’s a feeling. Like a dream that never really goes away.”
“I understand,” he nods, leaning back into his chair. “How are you sleeping?”
“Uh…” Rhodey takes a deep breath, thinks and tries to answer, but he can’t. He looks away and fiddles with his medical tag.
Edgerton frowns, unsure how to take that, and changes gears. “What do you think happened differently in your case?”
“The whole thing is,” Rhodey hesitates, rolling his eyes up toward the ceiling, searching for the right place to start. “I mean it’s, it’s like it happened to somebody else…” He trails off, trying to find the right words.
“Can you try for me?”
“Things were going really well at first,” Rhodey sighs deeply and shakes his head, closing his eyes. “And then it just…blurs out.”
“At what point does it get blurry?”
“I’d say,” he thought about it for a moment, studying his bracelet. “When the last of the light disappeared. When the darkness took us completely.”
Edgerton nods, frowning deeply, trying not to push him too hard.
“Can I ask you a question?” Rhodey says.
“Sure.” He readjusts his glasses, apprehensive, but open.
“What’s the longest period of time you’d spent alone?” he asked, leaning forward. “I mean really alone, isolated for an extended time.”
Edgerton sucks air through his teeth and tilts his head up at the ceiling, thinking about it. “A day or two, I guess.” he shrugged, “Something like that.”
“So you’re asking me to describe things that you can’t possibly understand,” he said, nodding at the folder. “Things I’ve already failed to say a millions times before, to a million different people.”
“I know,” Edgerton nods, opening the folder a few pages deep, crossing his arms. “Listen, I want you to know that I’m not here to hem and haw over mistakes. I’m not here to play coulda-woulda-shoulda. Things happened. I understand that. They happened, and you can’t take ‘em back, and you can’t change it—”
“And I have to live with that.”
“Yes,” Edgerton says. “Yes you do. But you have to also understand that my job is to find the facts. I gather, collate, and organize. Not so that I can understand what happened, but so that I can understand why it happened.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Perspective,” he says, shrugging his shoulders.
In this moment of the video, Rhodey shakes his head, annoyed, and looks away.
“I want to be able to stand back,” Edgerton grasps the air with his hands. “And see the big picture.”
“The big picture. . .”
“Yeah,” He shrugs again, liking the sound of that, so he says it again, “Yeah, that’s it. You got it.”
Rhodey sighs heavily into his hands and then leans forward, resting his forehead onto the table, staring at the floor. “I want this to be over, Mister Edgerton. I want it to end.”
Edgerton shakes his head sadly and sits back into his chair. “I wish it were up to me. God knows I do, son. But it isn’t. It’s up to you, Rhodey. You decide when this ends.”
End playback.
* * *
From the headline of the LA Times, June 27 2023:
MISSING DEEPSEA SCIENCE EXPEDITION TRIGGERS
MULTI-NATIONAL SEARCH
by Bernard San
(A photograph can be seen at the top of the article showing the three researchers who were aboard the Deepsea Meridian when it disappeared. All were academic looking men, wearing the same kind of relaxed clothing, dressed for the chilly sea breeze: jeans and khakis and polo shirts tucked in, each wearing a red vest over a navy blue fleece jacket with a nametag above the left breast. They stand on the main deck before launch in the sun, smiling in front of the pristine submersible glinting in the light. Of the three men pictured, only one would ever be seen alive again.)
Water rescue is searching for a deep sea submarine that has lost contact with its mission control after diving thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface, near what is widely accepted as the deepest part of the planet. Authorities say Douglass Sayvor, Treat Goodman, and Victor Rhodey—all oceanographers, biologists, and professors at the University of California—have been lost below the sea for twenty-two consecutive hours without radio contact. Operations are currently underway to search the seabed around the submersible�
�s planned point of contact, but the authorities know it’s a long shot.
“There is a drop off,” said Abigail Ruth, director of the Scripps Center of Oceanography. “The deepest drop off we’ve ever recorded. And before we lost contact, these men were heading straight for it.”
When asked how long researchers were expected to survive, the director replied, “Three men have enough onboard oxygen to last sixty hours, but there are a lot of variables to think about. The only thing that’s certain is they did successfully reach the sea floor, and they were beginning their approach toward the Meridian Line. That’s all we know at this time.”
[End of excerpt]
* * *
Evidence item Z-13 CN# 24-001387
Transcripted Audio Log, Deepsea Meridian
11:53:44 hrs, June 25, 2023
Static, a man’s voice (later identified as research diver Treat Goodman)
“Surface, this is Deepsea Meridian. We are on the bottom. Depth is thirty five thousand, six hundred and fifty feet, and everything looks good. Over.”
More static, transmission break—
“I repeat, Surface. We have touchdown.”
Static, transmission cutting in and out, a woman’s voice (later identified as surface controller Abigail Ruth)
“Copy, Meridian. How’s it look?”
Static—
“Desolate.”
Static, breathing, canned voices in the background—
“But undeniably beautiful.”
“Copy that, Meridian. Take lots of video for us.”
Static, transmission breaks, the sound of people cheering over com—
“Roger that. Surface, be advised, we are starting our transit toward the south chasm, over.”
“Copy that, 36,000 feet, we have you headed toward the Meridian Line. Co2 is good, vitals are good, A-Comms are good, good to go, whenever you’re ready.”
[End File]
* * *
From the headline of Rolling Stone Magazine, June 25, 2032:
RIDDLES OF THE ABYSS AND THE ENDLESS FALL
OF THE DEEPSEA MERIDIAN
by Damon Scribner
(A photograph of the dented crew chamber of the submersible Deepsea Meridian, taken from outside of the hatch, looking in. Most of it is dark, but there is enough light to see that the floor and the walls, the plate glass viewport are all awash in dark red granulated blood, and when you look closer, you can see hundreds of smeared handprints in the visceral muck.)
It wasn’t the first time anything like this had happened.
Another diver disappeared before, in a submersible like the Deepsea Meridian. But unlike the crew of the Meridian, he was alone in the vast darkness. Not nearly as long, though – fifty three hours, compared to Victor Rhodey’s two hundred and sixteen – but long enough to know that he’d never again set foot on another submarine for the rest of his life.
“You’ve never known any darkness like the darkness of the ocean,” Francis Hoop says, the man who’d been lost in the Solomon Sea’s New Brighton Trench after his lander-weights malfunctioned and left him adrift at 18,000 feet between Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. “And in those last hours, when the floodlights had gone out, when the air started coming out of my mouth in thick clouds of ice,” he lights a cigarette and takes a deep, deep drag. His eyes go distant for a moment, and his jaw pulsates like an exposed artery. “You learn pretty quickly just how deep that darkness can penetrate. It stabs right down into the muscle, right through the bone, into the marrow.” He leans forward and pushes his index finger into the skin of his forearm, as if to show me how vulnerable it is. “You find out just what kind of man you really are.”
He opens the wheel of a revolver and dumps the bullets onto the thin card-table in his empty kitchen, many of them clattering onto the floor. Hoop is fifty-two years old, thin and swarthy, and his muscles below the flannel cutoff at the shoulder twist like knotted rope.
More than twenty years ago—eleven years before the disappearance of the Deepsea Meridian—Hoop had been on dozens of dives into some of the deepest places on Earth. Now he lives in an apartment in Cleveland, “As far away from the ocean as humanly fucking possible.”
He picks up a bullet off the table and stares at me with wide eyes.
“You know what this is?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say back. I’d come here to try and understand what Victor Rhodey might have gone through. Many of the files on the incident have been locked away by the Philippine government in diplomatic limbo, out of media reach for the better part of a decade. But I needed to know.
Hoop, however, explains that no matter how badly I try to understand the truth of what happened down there, I simply can’t. “You have to experience it for yourself,” he says. “That’s the only way.”
“I have part of a picture,” I tell him. “From the notes gleaned over the years. From testimonies given by the people who were involved.”
“But not the only testimony that matters,” he says. “Not from the person who was there.”
“That’s kinda why I came to you—”
“Maybe what you know isn’t what really happened,” he says, coring into me with his eyes. “You wanna know what it’s like down there?”
He drops the bullet into a chamber, spins the wheel, and then slaps it shut.
“Do you really want to know?” He asks, and then presses the gun to his own temple.
My guts go warm, and beads of sweat form on my chilled skin.
“Not like this,” I rasp. “I don’t want to do it like this.”
“I know you don’t,” he says, screwing the muzzle deeper into his head. “Nobody does.”
He pulls the trigger…nothing happens. Before I can stop him, he quickly pulls the trigger three more times. Four total. There are only five chambers in that gun.
I panic, reaching for his arm, and he pushes away from the table and stands.
“Stop it!” I demand.
He looks at me with intensity, like a Samurai preparing himself for death. And he pulls the trigger again.
And nothing happens. A crude smile parts his leathered skin, and he keeps pulling the trigger. Still alive.
“I can do this forever,” he says, pulling the trigger over and over again. “I can do this a hundred times. A thousand. And nothing’ll ever happen. Why? Because you don’t have all the facts. You are forming your idea of reality on something that isn’t true. Despite all the facts you think you have, you are wrong.”
Just like the Deepsea Meridian, he tells me. Just like the second and third-hand testimonies, I’ve been pouring through. They’re all convenient answers for an inconvenient moment. An attempt to make sense of something that we just don’t understand.
[End of excerpt]
* * *
Evidence item U-33 CN# 24-001387
Victor Rhodey Video Interview #62 [original video recording, pre transcription]
Master: not for distribution, under penalty of law.
August 20, 2023
Begin playback:
“We made good time,” Rhodey says, cutting the silence. “For the first few minutes, it was actually, pretty beautiful.” He tilts his head and smiles sadly, closing his eyes. “The dim light faded with each passing second, blending with hues of blueish green and violet, as far as you could see, a dense formlessness that enveloped everything in this awesome uniformity…and then the light slipped away, until there was nothing but us and the quiet words of God.”
Edgerton sits as still as a river stone, lost in the other man’s images.
“Our human eyes have forgotten what it’s like to see in the ocean,” he continues. “Because nature hadn’t selected us that way,” Rhodey stopped and took a deep breath, his eyes still closed. “We’d see things, but there was no sense of scale. It takes your brain a while to realize whether or not it’s looking at a speck of plankton, or some leviathan navigating the darkness far, far away. And after hours of marveling at the enor
mity of it all, dropping like a stone toward the center of the Earth, the sea floor emerged from below and rose up in the cones of our light like the shoulder of Atlas… and as the Meridian kissed the bottom, giant plumes of fine ancient sediment erupted like ghostly clouds around us.”
“And then you made your way toward the chasm,” Edgerton says, pulling himself back from the dream.
“We stayed on the bottom for a long time,” Rhodey says, opening his eyes, and the ghost of a smile melts back into the grim lines of his face. “It was like another planet. Completely sterilized of life. When we made our way toward the crevice, following the seafloor until the white dusty sediment cut to blackness like a wound at the Meridian Line, we launched the probe. It hovered far from the precipice, and we lowered it into the darkness.”
“And what did you see?”
“Nothing,” Rhodey shakes his head, opening his hands, “The blackness was so thick it sheered the drone’s light a foot or two away from the camera. It was absolutely seamless. Pristine. Almost like we had been frozen in a glacier of volcanic glass.”
Edgerton slowly lowers himself into the opposite chair and waits for the thinner man to continue.
“It’s hard for me to describe what happened next,” Rhodey says, looking away. “I can’t remember if we had been pushed over the edge by something, or if the Earth just… just opened and swallowed us. I remember hearing a loud crack, and I thought something had imploded in the battery cache…”
Rhodey is becoming visibly stressed. He reaches up and presses hard into his temples with his palms, and we notice for the first time that he’s shaking badly, trembling under the stark light of the room, trying very hard not to lose control.
“Rhodey,” Edgerton says, very slow and very clear. “What did you see?”
“I saw,” he breathes, feeling everything slipping through his fingers, remembering something salient and deep and terrifying. “I don’t know what I saw…”
“Tell me,” Edgerton says with intensity, edging forward on his seat. “Tell me what you saw.”
At this point in the video, Rhodey is shaking his head from side to side, clamping his mouth shut, the skin on his forehead going white from the pressure of his hands. Edgerton seems to come to his senses and realizes what’s about to happen, and he holds his arms out like he’s afraid that the smaller man might detonate.
Fearful Fathoms: Collected Tales of Aquatic Terror (Vol. I - Seas & Oceans) Page 36