“Okay, okay, okay let’s back up a bit—” Edgerton soothes, rising again to his feet, stepping around the table to put a gentle hand on Rhodey’s shoulder. Edgerton rubs his arm, trying to coax him out of whatever personal hell he’d fallen into. “—you’re okay, Rhodey. It’s all right, come back now—”
“We fell,” Rhodey hisses suddenly, tears brimming in his eyes. There’s panic there, building on the edges of his vision—a deep terror and trauma corroding the sanity like acid. “We just kept falling.”
Edgerton wraps his arm around the smaller man’s trembling shoulders, who collapses into a freshet of choking sobs. Rhodey comes to pieces under the contact, and he claws into the bigger man’s embrace, pressing his face deep into his shirt, as if he were trying to hide from something malicious and terrible. Shocked, Edgerton opens his arms, afraid to touch him. The thin broken man screams suddenly—a high-pitched wail of terror—and sobs like a lost child alone in the darkness of night, and the bigger man just stands there not knowing what to do, frowning behind his thick framed glasses and clenching his jaw like gunfire.
End playback.
* * *
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
“When they do eventually find you,” Hoop says, “They won’t let you open your eyes for hours.”
It’s 7:15 am. Cartoons flicker quietly in the living room. Toast burns on the counter near the stove, but all of the smoke detectors have long since died, and Hoop stands at a window in the virgin daylight spilling in, staring out into the half-lit dawn wearing nothing but a pair of boxers and some flip-flops.
“I mean, you’ve just survived this major spiritual odyssey, and the only thing you want to do is lay eyes upon the face of another human being,” he turns, staring hard into me. “Because this isn’t the first time somebody’s rescued you,” he nods, looking back out at the new dawn. “Oh yeah, you’ve been there already a thousand times in your dreams. Rescued. And just as you open your lungs to drink in the fresh sea air, you find yourself back in the pilot chamber. Back in the dark, where you’d screamed yourself hoarse a long, long time ago.”
The sun breaks the horizon somewhere far to the left, crawling up Hoop’s knuckles that rest on the screenless sill.
“That last hour was the hardest,” he said. “I kept expecting to wake back up in the capsule. I kept thinking I’d realize my eyes had been open the whole time, staring into the unblinking gaze of nothingness, and that I’d completely lost my mind and imagined the whole thing.”
Even when you’re sleeping, he told me, trace amounts of light still get through the thin skin of your lids. This is why your eyes have a tendency to roll up into your head during REM. Your brain seeks the darkest parts of the cavity so it can recalibrate itself as efficiently as possible. You’re not aware of the light, because it’s a relative lightness darker than what you’re used to, but it’s there. And in the deep alien realm below the crushing-line of the Solomon Sea, 27,000 feet down, there’s no light whatsoever. It’s the complete lack of light, darker than space. Darker than the grave.
“When I imagine the darkness of a black hole, I think of the ocean,” Hoop explains, taking a drag on his newly lit Marlboro. “And when they find you, they scream to keep your eyes closed, because they’ve atrophied so badly,” He raises his chin up and out of his cracked window. “After days of floating through that pitch nothingness, even the soft sunlight that bleeds through an overcast sky can melt your retinas right out of your skull. And then it’s lights out for good.”
He pulls back for a moment, thinking about something deeper and more personal than anything he wants to share.
“They take this thick black piece of fabric,” he continues, pulling back out of a memory. “And wrap it around your eyes about four times.” He demonstrates this by pantomiming around his own head. “Hours later, after several bags of saline have been pumped into your veins, they finally peel it off. The only light you can stand is the soft flame of a candle. And after enduring what you’d endured, that tiny flickering light looks like nuclear explosions on the sun.”
[End of excerpt.]
* * *
Evidence item R-88 CN# 24-001387
Transcripted Audio Log, Deepsea Meridian
12:10:44 hrs, June 25, 2023
(Paper-clipped to the top of a stack of Transcripted audio logs is a photograph of a team of men wearing hard hats and gloves working frantically to pull open the hatch of the Deepsea Meridian. They’re lifting a naked man out of the crew capsule, whose limbs appear dead and lifeless, as if he were unconscious. The dangerously thin man is blindfolded, and there is a thick paintbrush swipe of dark coagulated blood smeared across his gaping mouth, which is full of unidentifiable chunks of muck. When you look closer, you see that his hands and arms are coated with a brownish black grime up to the midline of his forearms.)
The following transcript was recovered from the Meridian’s black box. You hear the voices of the crew of the Deepsea Meridian, but it’s hard to tell who is speaking over the confusion. Because there’s no record of this recording, it is assumed that the crew had lost surface Comms moments before transmission.
— “Surface, Deep Sea Meridian, do you copy, over?”
— We got no voice Comms
—Depth gauge is not changing
—Just lost thrusters
—Not good, not good
—Thrusters not responding
—We got a problem
—Reading several failures here, anybody got a depth?
—We can’t stop without thrusters
—This is not good
—Clocks stopped, depth gauges stopped, everything’s stopped.
—Speed is three knots
—Come on guys, think, sort it out
—Three and a half knots
—Surface, Deepsea Meridian, we have fallen into the chasm, and we are aborting our descent, over
—Dropping weights
—Four and a half knots
—Weights not dropping. I repeat, weights are not dropping
—What?!
—Trying again
—That’s a negative
—Oh god.
The tortured whale song of contracting metal can be heard in the background, and then there’s a loud crack
—Dropping weights
—Weights are not responding, over. Surface, do you copy? Our weights are not responding. We cannot abort descent, over
Screams erupt from the transmission, followed by a single pop of static and a long stream of dead air. These were the last words of the Meridian crew.
End file.
* * *
Evidence item T-1 CN# 24-001387
Deepsea Meridian, crew capsule [original video recording, pre transcription]
Master: not for distribution, under penalty of law.
July 5, 2023
Begin playback:
A man is crouching before an opened hatch with a shocked look on his face, stealing nervous glances from the person manning the camera. A light drizzle mists his damp hair, and a sea wind flattens his navy windbreaker against his chest. The sky is overcast, but it’s warm, and the Deepsea Meridian looms over his shoulder like a hollowed monument.
“This is July fifth, twenty twenty-three,” he closes his mouth and swallows, delaying the moment, gathering his thoughts. “Uh… location is the Port of Manila, and we’re going to move into to the actual crew capsule…”
The man pushes back onto his knees so the camera can edge forward.
“Watch your head,” the man says out of frame.
The camera light flicks on and blinds the image for a moment until the lens readjusts to the darkness. The camera blades forward unsteadily, shaking the image, but then it settles, and slowly pans the inside of the capsule, illuminating an awesome sight.
&nb
sp; “As you can see,” The man says in a daze. “This…this is…”
And his voice fails him. There isn’t another word spoken for the rest of the recording. As the camera pans and tilts slowly around the cabin, we see filth and gut-ripping viscera caked all over the inside, and it’s hard to tell exactly what you’re looking at. There’s some kind of meat paste coating the walls: blood and hair and bubbles of what could be remnants of skin and internal organs. But no bones. No bodies. Nothing to identify any single human being that went down into the deepness ten days before this recording. Just brackish coagulated layers of blood and excrement, coating every square centimeter of the capsule’s interior, smeared by a thousand glistening handprints.
End Playback
* * *
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
“When the lights finally went out,” Hoop says, plugging a thumb drive into his laptop. “I had this detached feeling of acceptance, and it didn’t take me long to come to terms with what was going to happen next.”
Gauges, lights, and thrusters all started malfunctioning, he told me, at around 17,500 feet. He dropped another thousand before forcing himself to abort the descent, a depth only a handful of humans on the planet can ever say they’ve reached.
“I hit the weight release,” he leans back into his chair. “And nothing. No drop. And I couldn’t stop falling.” He shrugs, “So I dumped all my shot to slow myself down, and calmly informed the surface of my situation. A moment came when I could finally feel one of the weight-salvos detach and fall away. The other didn’t. I found out later they got snagged on the release mechanism.”
He stares into the screen for a long time, from a thousand yards away, rolling something invisible between his thumb and index finger, perhaps remembering the dead snick of the weight-release switch flicking back and forth over and over again.
“I was stuck,” he says finally, shaking his head. “Trapped between the weight of the submersible pulling me down, and the pressure of the ocean pushing me back up.”
His eyes focused, and he opened a folder labeled MERIDIAN. A thousand photos, documents, and videos poured out onto his desktop.
“For two days,” he continued, lighting a cigarette. “The ocean pulled me between 18 and 16,000 feet. They said I drifted seventeen miles before a US seawolf-class submarine picked me up on sonar completely by accident. The only reason I’m here today is because of that submarine, and the fact that we had another deep sea submersible on standby to tow me to the surface.”
That’s exactly what happened to the Meridian. Except when their weights failed, they got stuck about 30,000 feet deeper than where Hoop ended up. He leaned forward and clicked a video file that opened to a dim circle of light afloat within an indistinguishable blackness. It was footage from one of the two cameras attached to the Deepsea Meridian’s boom.
“They were out there for nine days…nine fucking days, stuck at 43,000 feet.” He sucked air through his teeth and shook his head. “I was out there for a little over two, and I can’t even imagine what that was like.”
Hoop presses play, but the image on his desktop remains static and unchanged but for the flicker of shadows that pass behind the airlock’s tiny viewport. Which meant somebody was alive in there. Somebody was moving.
“That deep? Nobody’s coming for you.” He aims his hand at the computer screen like a gun, and pretends to pull the trigger. “The only chance Rhodey had of ever seeing the light of day again, was if he himself found a way.”
I followed his eyes toward the screen, and deep prehistoric strings pulled in my gut—instincts written into me by thousands of years of my ancestors watching the shadows for the telltale eye-shine of a predator. On the playback, something seethed up out of the darkness. Some obscure mass pulsating and unfolding like the meaty petals of a desert flower, gravitating toward the smothered light of the Deepsea Meridian, which looked so small and so fragile.
“He was alone, and there was nobody coming to save him,” Hoop breathed smoke, and froze the image, leaning deeper into his chair. “And he knew it.”
[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:
“There was something in the chasm,” Rhodey says helplessly. “Some…something none of us had ever seen before.”
Edgerton leans into him, searching his face. “What did you see?”
“A man,” Rhodey whispers, staring up into the florescent light. “A man, like you and me, but…but different. Pale…almost…almost clear enough that I could see right into him, see down into his guts.”
The video file pixelates for a moment as Edgerton stares at him, transfixed and completely taken off guard.
“He was terrified,” Rhodey says suddenly, searching Edgerton’s face. Tears gather beneath his lashes. “And I knew…I just knew by looking at him that he’d do anything to see the surface again. Anything.”
“A man,” Edgerton echoes quietly. He pushes himself away from Rhodey, sliding himself back against the opposite wall, and tries to make sense of it all. He removes his glasses and stares at the other man pressed into the corner with his knees pulled up to his chest. “A man in the ocean. At 43,000 feet…”
“A pale man,” Rhodey wipes his red rimmed eyes, and shakes his head. “A terrified man, who would do everything in his power to survive.”
End Playback.
* * *
Evidence item A-12 CN# 24-001387
Breaking News Report of the Deepsea Meridian Resurface [original video recording, pre- transcription]
Master: not for distribution, under penalty of law.
July 4, 2023
Begin playback:
A woman in her sixties approaches a podium stationed outside somewhere near the sea, and the wind blows the collar of her light blue shirt beneath the cusp of her thick wool jacket. Men and women surround her in the margin of the frame, and we can hear the endless clicking and clacking of cameras snapping photographs in the background. She’s attractive for her age, even puffy from hours of latent tears and anxiety. Only her mouth betrays her classic beauty: it is grim and confused and sad, unsure of the words.
“Today, at 12:30 this afternoon, the submersible Deepsea Meridian resurfaced in Western Pacific Ocean after being lost for nine days. It surfaced intact, 124 miles off the coast of Guam. I and the Scripps Center for Oceanography extend our deepest gratitude to the rescue workers of the Philippine coast guard, who have worked tirelessly these past days in partnership with the United States Navy to find our lost sons, and bring them home. It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of two researchers, Douglass Sayvor, and Treat Goodman, who were beloved husbands and fathers and teachers. Victor Rhodey is in critical condition, but he is alive, he is speaking, and he is doing well. We’ll have more information in the coming days, but for now, we ask that you have the grace to let the families and friends of the people we’ve lost today mourn. Thank you and God bless.”
Without another word, the woman steps away from the podium and takes the offered arms of a man and a woman who lead her out of frame. The crowd behind the camera erupts in a chorus of hurried voices and the clicking of even more cameras, like the scuttle of crab migrating over a killing-ground of smooth stone.
End Playback.
* * *
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
It’s a wide shot of the Meridian hatch. The submersible floats by the stark cones of floodlight that extend away fro
m the hull, angled down toward the undifferentiated bottomlessness beneath it. All around is darkness. Pitch darkness, like an ocean of tar. The Meridian is hanging in the balance at 43,000 feet, drifting far away from the rescue workers searching the waters miles above. There is no life down there. Nothing on this planet—that we know of—can survive the crushing pressures of those depths. So when a blur of pale light unfolds from the darkness and glides up toward the floodlights—the very fringes of it kissing the margins of the frame—just out of view—I find that I can’t breathe.
“When the Deepsea Meridian came up out of the water,” Hoop intones. “We didn’t know what we would find in there. We prepared ourselves for three dead bodies that had long since succumbed to hypoxia. And when they lifted it up overhead with the crane, and I was just staring up at this thing—dragging my eyes along the crack that spanned the length of it—you know, all that I had gone through in New Britain came back in a wave of panic. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure if I was the guy standing on the deck waiting for the Meridian to be lowered, or if I was one of the terrified people stuck inside the capsule. All I knew was that I had to get whoever was alive out of there. Because… if you take what I went through and multiply it by eternity, and bring it all the way to the edge of forever, you’d still have only the vaguest conception of what Rhodey went through.”
I stare at the image, studying the small curl of something at the bottom of the frame, and Hoop scrubs the playback, moving deeper into the timeline, speeding the shadows inside the capsule into a flurry of activity.
“And when I opened the hatch and looked down into the crew capsule,” he breathed, shaking his head at the memory. “The smell…the slaughterhouse smell of copper and shit… the world snapped back into focus. I was Frank Hoop again, screaming down at Rhodey to keep his eyes closed. And I’ll never forget the look of him reaching up into the light like a starved, terrified child with tears streaming down his mottled face.”
He drags the scrubber two thirds of the way down the playback, and pauses the image.
Fearful Fathoms: Collected Tales of Aquatic Terror (Vol. I - Seas & Oceans) Page 37