by Unknown
It was an old sea dog talking and Jackson felt a shiver down his back.
Brooke’s voice brought him right back to reality. ‘Don’t tell me, you’ve found someone gullible enough to listen to your rubbish!’
Jackson looked down on to the deck below and saw Brooke standing there, the front of her head covered by a pair of very large goggles. They were part of a virtual reality headset.
‘You like my new shades?’ said Brooke.
‘I’ve heard that big is in, so you’ll be OK with those,’ replied Jackson.
‘They come with a matching glove,’ said Brooke, holding up what looked like the glove from a wetsuit. It was attached to the headset via a bright yellow hose. ‘It’s completely waterproof. The idea is that whoever is driving Verne has the choice of doing it from the deck of the boat, or jumping into the water to join him. Wanna try it on?’
Brooke slipped the goggles over Jackson’s head. Instantly he could see a great expanse of ocean and white frothy wash, which he guessed was Verne’s current view over the back of the vessel.
‘The display can work as a simple video camera,’ Brooke continued. ‘Or with acoustic imaging in zero-visibility conditions.’
‘Jeepers, girl! Would you stop talking like a computer,’ Salty scolded from up on the bridge.
‘It means you can drive Verne in pitch black, Salty. A bit like you do, when you fall asleep at the helm.’
There was a splutter of laughter from J.P.’s direction.
‘Now you wouldn’t be gettin’ into a quarrel with an old man who knows enough about you to turn that pretty little face of yours as red as the hair on your head?’
‘This could be interesting,’ said Jackson.
‘You keep quiet, old man, or I’ll refuse to fix the engine in this junk bucket next time she’s had enough of you!’
Salty leaned over the edge of the bridge and whispered down to Brooke and Jackson. ‘And then I might have to tell of the time you forgot to collect your pappy’s car from off the beach. I wonder how he’d take the news that his precious sports car wasn’t thieved, but was swallowed up by the ocean?’
‘How did you know that?’ hissed an amazed Brooke, looking carefully behind to make sure her father wasn’t in earshot.
‘Old Salty knows a lot of things,’ winked the old fisherman. And Jackson believed him.
Half an hour later The Oceanaut had shut down her engines and was drifting gently in the calm sea. J.P. checked the vessel’s location on the GPS readout on his tablet computer. ‘This is it,’ said the professor. ‘OK, Matty, prep her for a dive.’
Jackson scanned the horizon in all directions. They were so far out now that neither the coast nor the boats that hung around the entrance to Edgartown were visible. All that broke up the shimmering expanse of blue were the ripples created by the odd tern that dived for food, and the distant outline of a yacht.
‘This is my dad’s preferred testing spot,’ said Brooke. ‘There’s a series of large rocks and trenches on the seabed here which are perfect for doing manoeuvrability and depth tests. Salty has brought us here a hundred times. He swears he navigates by nothing more than smell.’
‘Verne is checked and ready,’ said J.P. ‘How about you, Brooke?’
J.P. stood in the cabin at the centre of the boat. The rest of the group had assembled by the cabin’s doorway to listen to his briefing. Jackson thought Brooke looked hilarious, leaning against the boat’s railings in flip-flops, flowery Bermuda shorts and a large high-tech VR helmet on her head. ‘All systems are go, Boss,’ was her muffled reply.
‘Verne will be operating here on the seabed at a depth of around one hundred metres,’ J.P. said as he commenced his briefing. ‘Our primary task is to test his new augmented display and make sure he responds properly to all of Brooke’s inputs. Last time we were here we mapped the position of a few objects of interest.’
‘Buried treasure,’ Brooke whispered to Jackson, with an air of mystery.
‘Discarded scuba dive tanks to be precise,’ continued the professor. ‘The important thing is that we know their precise location on the ocean floor so we can use them as markers for Verne’s augmented display. In order to do that, once we reach the ocean floor, I’ll ask Brooke to turn Verne’s video cameras off. From that point on, she’ll be flying using just this computer-generated scan of the ocean floor.’
J.P. turned one of the large flatscreen monitors in the cabin towards the group. It showed a vivid image of what looked like an aerial view of a mountain range, with bright green peaks and valleys of dark red. In one of the red trenches, Jackson could see a cluster of four wire-framed pill-shaped objects.
‘Are those the scuba tanks?’ he asked, pointing at the tiny pills on the screen.
‘They sure are. If Brooke can guide Verne to the bottles and have him pick one of them up, using just this virtual map, then we’ll be confident the augmented display can work in total blackout.’
‘And what does this colour represent?’ said Jackson, referring to a dark reddish-purple area at the top of the screen.
‘Swallow Hole,’ said Salty, with his eyes wide. ‘She’ll swallow you up as easy as you can say her name.’
‘It’s one of several deep-water trenches in this part of the Atlantic Ocean,’ said J.P., smiling. ‘Salty likes to get lyrical about its reputation for having sucked many sailors and their ships down to their doom. But we won’t be going anywhere near it today.’
‘Shipwrecks? Cool. Couldn’t you use Verne to investigate or is it too deep down there?’ asked Jackson.
‘Nothing’s too deep for Verne. He’s designed to operate in the deep ocean, at depths as low as 10,000 metres,’ said J.P.
‘The pressure must be incredible down there!’ said Jackson.
‘Roughly 16,000 pounds per square inch.’
‘That’s the equivalent of stacking three Tin Lizzies on your little toe,’ said Brooke.
‘He must be pretty tough then,’ murmured Jackson, glancing over to the white robot sphere swinging gently in its cradle.
‘Ceramics on the outside – syntactic foam on the inside,’ said Brooke. ‘The outer shell is about the only material strong enough to withstand the enormous forces pressing in on Verne at those depths. The foam inside is a super-strong mix of metal and polymer filled with hollow particles called micro-balloons. The tiny balloons allow Verne to float in the water.’
‘OK, guys, science lesson over, we’ve got work to do,’ interrupted J.P. ‘Matty, get Verne into the water! Salty, I need you to keep The Oceanaut steady against the tide.’
‘Aye, aye. She’ll not move, Doc.’
‘Jackson, you’re our numbers man.’ J.P. handed Jackson his tablet computer. ‘There are four diving cylinders down there. I want you to keep an eye on the position we have mapped for them and cross-reference it with Brooke’s virtual readout. You can see what Brooke’s VR helmet is showing on the tablet screen.’
‘Ain’t that summat one of yer computer machines could do?’ asked Salty.
‘Jackson is a computer,’ said Brooke.
Jackson sized up the device he’d been handed. It was about the size of an A4 pad, with black-and-yellow rubber around its edges. He touched its screen and instantly the 10.4-inch OLED display showed the bright white hull and shiny chrome steps at the back of the boat, before being filled with crystal blue as Verne was lowered into the water.
Jackson glanced in Brooke’s direction. She was sitting in a deckchair in the middle of the deck, forming abstract shapes with her gloved hand. He could see the changing view from Verne on the tablet computer screen as the machine responded to her bizarre sign language and rolled a full circle while descending.
‘Less of the freestyle, please, honey. Keep it nice and smooth.’ J.P. was inside the cabin watching the feeds from Verne on several large flatscreens.
Now the boat was stationary, the cooling breeze from their journey out here had been replaced by waves of heat that bounced up from the sp
arkling water. But even in the bright September sun, the details on the tablet’s touch-screen were very clear. The wide-angle lens from the camera mounted on Verne’s nose showed a welcoming bright blue world. Clouds of silver fish flashed in coordinated turns against the sand. Flanking the beltway of seabed were row after row of light-grey rocks, which Jackson thought looked very similar to the scan J.P. had shown them. It was hard to get a sense of scale from the high-definition video feed, but from the height of the tall green weeds that rose from them and billowed in the current, the biggest of the rocks was taller than a house.
It took only a few minutes for Brooke to guide Verne to the sea floor, at which point she levelled him out and flew him less than a metre above the sand. The view from the ball-shaped machine reminded Jackson of the robotic missions he and Brooke had flown for MeX. The volcanic gullies and peaks were like miniature versions of the hills and valleys of Ukraine and Moldova they had passed on their way to their final encounter with Lear. It was a ride he’d relived many times in his dreams, sometimes waking in a sweat as ghoulish flying saucers stalked him through the branches of a dark forest, or villagers ran screaming as Jackson lost control of Tug and smashed him through row upon row of cottages and farmhouses. This time, however, Jackson wasn’t scared. He had rarely seen anything as beautiful as the underwater moonscape through which Verne was gliding.
‘Numbers, Farley?’ called J.P.
Towards the top of his screen, Jackson could see a range of digits which represented Verne’s speed, his barometric altitude, which was calculated by measuring changes in the pressure of the water around him, the elapsed time since leaving the boat, his rate of climb or descent in metres per second and four sets of descending six-figure numbers which Jackson took to be the distances to the cluster of diver’s tanks. ‘He’s about four hundred metres from the target zone.’
‘OK, Brooke, you happy to switch to the virtual view?’ J.P. asked.
‘But it’s so beautiful down there, why would you wanna go spoil it?’ replied Brooke.
The view from inside Brooke’s helmet instantly snapped from an iridescent blue underwater wonderland to the stark electric greens, yellows and reds of Verne’s acoustic seabed scan. ‘Which joker just turned the lights out in my aquarium?’ she said.
Jackson still had the feed from Verne’s cameras, but was able to jump between it and the seabed scan that Brooke was seeing by touching the VIEW tab. And, as he did so, he noticed an instant change in the values at the top of the screen.
To a casual observer, it would have seemed impossible to discern the minute differences in the reams of quickly changing digits that crowned the two views. But in Jackson’s finely tuned numerical brain, the figures, which denoted Verne’s height, speed and direction, were not consistent. In the way a baseball player sees the curve in the flight of a ball when the rest of us see a straight line, or a composer computes all the possible combinations of notes before selecting the least expected one, Jackson sensed that the real position of Verne in the water was roughly 3.5 millimetres north by north-east of the position the virtual display had him in.
‘By my reckoning, if Brooke continues in her current direction, Verne will be about 1.7 metres wide of the target zone when he reaches it. You need to recalibrate the virtual display,’ Jackson called out, pausing to think for moment. ‘Add three decimal seconds to the longitude axis and take away two decimal seconds from the latitude axis.’
‘I’ll be damned! The boy’s a talking compass!’ Salty shouted from his vantage point on the bridge.
‘I told you he was good,’ laughed Brooke.
‘OK, I’ve made the corrections. Brooke, you’re cleared to retrieve the tanks now. Take it nice and easy. Remember, they’re probably still pressurized. We don’t want any accidents.’
CHAPTER 13
The view from inside Brooke’s headset looked just like a video game. The seabed was represented by an intricate mesh of electric-blue lines that traced the precise contours of the ocean floor, and virtual waves rolled along the top of her display. Glinting in the distance were six bright white pill-shaped objects, graphical renderings of the discarded scuba tanks she was aiming for.
Brooke moved her gloved hand through a series of delicate gestures and Verne slowly turned away from the tanks and started to descend. Almost instantaneously J.P.’s voice came over the intercom.
‘Do we have a problem, Brooke?’
‘No, Dad, I just think that if this is supposed to be a test of Verne, that’s exactly what we should be doing.’
As she spoke, she twisted her wrist and the robot gracefully descended towards a deep ravine with steep rock sides.
‘Brooke, I’d prefer that you made straight for the tanks, please.’
‘Dad, we haven’t really tested this acoustic display, and a little sightseeing excursion is the perfect way to do it. Just trust me.’
‘OK, but I want you over to those scuba tanks in less than a minute,’ urged her father.
Jackson watched the screen in his hands as Brooke guided Verne’s spherical white shape through the narrow underwater trench. As the robot sank between two towering rock faces, his high-definition video view went black. But Brooke’s virtual display of the trench remained clear, part of thousands of square metres of the ocean floor previously mapped and stored in Verne’s memory.
Brooke began a steady roll to take Verne out of the ravine and on to the flat section of seabed where the scuba tanks were situated, when the robot veered suddenly to one side, grinding hard against the rock face before flipping on to his back.
‘What’s going on!’ J.P. was on the radio net in a flash.
‘I don’t know! He just flipped out.’
‘Can you move him?’
Brooke triggered full throttle, but Verne hardly budged at all. ‘I think he’s caught on something.’
‘It’ll be lobster netting.’ Salty had come down from the bridge. ‘They drift in the currents and get torn up around the rocks.’
‘Damn it, Brooke!’ J.P. smashed down his fist on the cabin console. His face was bright red. ‘For once, couldn’t you have just done what you were told?’
Brooke pulled off the headset and glove and looked down at the deck. This time, she had nothing to say. Jackson could see she felt terrible. It didn’t matter that Brooke was one of the most confident people Jackson had ever met; it was the second time in a week she’d let her father down, and he could see she was angry with herself.
Jackson followed her as she walked towards the front of the boat and opened the door to the hold. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ he said, not entirely confident he believed what he was saying.
‘He’s right, and you know it,’ Brooke replied in frustration, searching hurriedly through several boxes and bags. ‘I should have done what he asked, but I had to go and try somethin’ fancy.’
‘What are you doing now?’ asked Jackson.
‘Here they are!’ she said, pulling a large blue-and-black triangle-shaped object from what looked like a waterproof pack, followed by a long knife in a rubber sheath. ‘It’s a mono-fin! Don’t breath a word of this to Pops. By the time he realizes I’m in the water, I’ll have freed Verne and be on my way back.’
A dumbfounded Jackson followed Brooke on to the deck as she turned away from the cabin and moved to the bow, out of sight of her father and Salty.
‘This is a really bad idea, Brooke.’
‘I can fix this, Jackson.’ She smiled up at him from the deck on which she sat, clipping a weight belt round her waist and slipping a diving mask on to her forehead. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes. If Dad asks, tell him I’m below deck. Now help me get this on.’
Brooke was holding what looked like the bottom section of a mermaid’s costume. She slid one foot into the top of the carbon-fibre mono-fin and then leaned on Jackson while she slid in her other foot. She strapped the knife to her ankle, pulled her face mask down over her eyes and sat on the handrail that ran the length of t
he boat.
‘See you in a jiffy!’ Brooke said, and then promptly dropped backwards into the water.
Several hundred metres away from The Oceanaut, a dark-grey shape moved through the water at a speed few sea creatures could match. Like the spherical robot, whose whirling ripples had attracted the fish in the first place, it was able to adjust its course precisely. A series of subtle adjustments to its own control surfaces – smooth, rigid, pectoral fins – saw it navigate its deadly way with increasing purpose.
If Jackson hadn’t been focusing quite so intently on the screen of his tablet PC, in an attempt to make out what Verne was snagged on, he might have seen his first Great White Shark. Its streamlined six-metre body glided diagonally underneath the boat and began to circle.
Salty spotted it immediately, taking his cap off and using it to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
‘Well, would ya look at him! Ain’t he a grand fella?’
‘Who is?’ Jackson looked up from the PC, confused.
‘That old Great White,’ Salty replied, not looking away from the waves.
Jackson froze. ‘Do you mean shark?’ He ran to the side of the boat and looked down into the water.
‘They’re very common in this part of the Atlantic,’ J.P. said calmly, checking the monitors for signs of the animal. ‘Get Brooke. She won’t want to miss this.’
Jackson could hardly form the words. ‘She’s in the water!’ he croaked.
All three men turned and looked at Jackson.
‘How can she be?’ said J.P. ‘She’s in the hold!’
‘She was worried she’d let you down. She went down there to fetch her swimming fin. I tried to stop her, but she was over the side before I had time to say anything.’
‘You idiot!’ bellowed J.P.
Just then there was a deep thud against the hull of the boat and Jackson saw the dark outline of the shark hugging the side of The Oceanaut as it cruised slowly past.