by Hugo Navikov
Mickey gave a “Roger” to that, laughing himself. She could hear him relay the message to Sean. “Oh, he loved that, Kitty. Score!”
She laughed anew, maybe even getting a little hysterical with relief, and smiled with each tug … tug … tug on the cable from her overcautious, sweet husb—
Slip. The sub slipped a little. Kat wouldn’t fall very fast if Sean accidentally released the cable for a few seconds, but she would definitely start falling. “Mickey! What’s going on up there?”
Mickey said, “Stand by,” and used the handset to call to Sean: “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot! Status, man!”
“I-I had a solid grip. Solid—but then something happened to the arm on this goddamn piece of garbage! I got a hold of it with the other hand, the right clamp. The left one is inoperative. Copy me?”
“Copy.” Mickey relayed the information to Kat in D-Plus.
“Whew. I almost screamed there,” Kat said. “I take it he had enough line pulled up when the clamp opened that he was able to catch it with the other?”
“Just so, Doctor Muir. We didn’t feel any tug up here, which is good, because that bit of cable doesn’t look like it could take one.”
“Mickey,” Sean radioed.
“Everything is unchanged up here. You had enough slack so it didn’t pull the cable.”
“No, Mick, this JSL piece of crap, I’ve taken it too deep—the arms’ hydraulic fluid is being squeezed out through some fissure. What can I do? I need to know right now.”
Unfortunately, Mickey knew the JSL, which really was a relic and something they should have realized couldn’t take the pressure so near its known crush zone without major malfunctions. He told Sean what he knew, careful to lift his thumb off the button he used to talk to D-Plus: “Not a goddamn thing, Sean. I’m sorry. Maybe try to position yourself underneath Kat so your buoyancy can keep her from sinking. Shoot your ballast as soon as you get under. As soon as your fluid runs out, the hydraulic pressure will bottom out and that clamp will pop open like the cable’s hot.”
“Mick, tell Kat to hang in there,” Sean said, his nerves all caught up in his voice. “No! Don’t say that! Tell her we’ve got a plan.”
Their crew chief picked up the mic to tell her, but before he could say a word, the cable going into the water pulled taut.
And snapped.
Mickey screamed into the mic, “Katherine! Kat! Copy! Do you copy?” But there was no response, because she couldn’t possibly have heard him. The ultimate mission was to go deeper than radio waves could quickly propagate, and so all the communications to D-Plus came through the data lines inside that goddamn cable. He could feel all of the blood drain from his face as he lifted the handset and tried to yell, but could only croak, “Sean? You copy? What the hell just happened? Goddamn, man, talk to me!”
His boss’s voice was like a ghost’s. “The clamp opened, just … so fast. I was getting in position under Kat to try to hold her up like you said, but the hydraulic fluid must have all emptied. The right clamp popped open … and she slipped. Jesus Christ, the cable slid right out of my grasp, and I couldn’t catch her.”
“Wait, Sean. Wait. How were you still holding the cable and getting in position under D-Plus? You’d have to let go of the cable to move under the sub.”
“I thought I had more slack, enough to do both.” He sounded shell-shocked, then as panic rose, he said quickly and loudly, “What’s happening? I can’t see the cable anymore—it’s got to be right there and I could catch it—”
“Not without working hands on that JSL.”
“—but I can’t see the sub, either. What’s her status? What’s Kat’s status, Mickey?”
“We lost contact with her when the cable snapped. We lost her, Sean … Jesus, we lost her.”
Sean tried to position the old piece of scrap metal so he could see the sub, see his wife one last time, before the lightless depths took her. But he could see nothing. The way the darkness enveloped everything this deep, there was literally nothing for him to see.
***
Katherine Muir was never afraid of the depths, not even down where it was all blackness and nothing lived. She believed in and had helped develop—maybe more than just “helped”—her husband’s theories about prehistoric animals evolving in order to take advantage of the food at the fiendishly hot hydrothermal vents. Her own PhD had come from a custom-study program of exobiology and geology. Everyone thought she was shooting for Mars, remotely, if not in person. But it was the sea that called her, life below where the sun could reach. She took the lead on several projects with subsequent publications of findings and was much sought after by several universities with elite departments of ocean sciences as well as those working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to explore the surface of the Red Planet.
She chose the sea.
And she chose Doctor Sean Muir, who wasn’t one of her teachers or advisors, but one who gave impassioned lectures about unusual life possible thanks to chemosynthesis. Sunlight wasn’t needed, just energy, and energy was abundant in lines stretching for thousands of miles in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. That life existed around these vents was well established—but Sean Muir wasn’t talking about tube worms and flatfish; he was talking about marine lizards, about dinosaurs. He did elicit chuckles and listeners shaking their heads, but the people who held the purse strings at this university often attended lectures featuring the wild surmises of brilliant men and women, Sean being one of them.
His argument for the existence of conscious, complex life-forms (of which dinosaurs were merely the most dramatic and mathematically likely given the timescales involved) along the lines of vents was convincing while also being thrilling. He attracted people with his mind, but also with his generous heart. Katherine fell in love with him the first time she stopped by one of his lectures.
They were no sooner married than they created an ambitious, not to mention expensive, research program that would involve three departments of the school and sponsorship by private businesses as well as funding from the usual government agencies. The funding path charted out, they began work with a phalanx of theorists, designers, and metal-benders to create D-Plus, a serious research vessel with an intentionally goofy name that made everyone smile. They went through so many tests on dry dock and just below the surface that sometimes she felt like she lived inside that thing.
If Sean hadn’t hurt his fingers, he would be down here, she thought for the hundredth time as she waited at the end of the cable for her husband to come down and rescue her with that Robby-the-Robot JSL sub. It was funny that it would be the JSL that saved her life. She hated that old junk pile; she thought it made them look like amateurs. But now it would be her salvation, the rusty steed ridden by her knight in aquatic armor. She didn’t know how to pilot the JSL, and if Sean hadn’t hurt his fingers, he would be down here. She wouldn’t have been able to save him. Surely one of the academic support crew would know their way around the JSL. But if they didn’t, her husband would be lost.
However, he had hurt his fingers and so he wasn’t down here. It was Katherine, thirty-two and almost tenured, married to a brilliant man who would change the way the world understood life and evolution. Her life was everything she could have wished for, but now it was, literally, hanging by a thread.
Then the organic detritus outside the viewport began to glow, and she knew she was saved, she knew Sean had taken that dangerous antique almost to its crush depth to save her. Mickey sent messages down the comm lines to her and then radioed her replies to Sean. Her oxygen and scrubbers would last until they got to the surface—just barely, but if they didn’t waste any time, they’d make it.
She felt the tugs and the upward movement of D-Plus. The submersible’s ballast wouldn’t release, but they would work around that; they always found a way to work around any trouble.
Tug, tug, tug. It was going to be slow going, but things never moved quickly in the deep. She was definitely moving in the righ
t direction—
Then the sub slipped. That was exactly what it felt like: an ignition not catching, but almost there; a heavy bucket going off the track of a pulley, but just for a second before it corrects itself; holding hands with a toddler who loses his footing but is pulled back up before striking the floor.
The cable must have slipped through or out of Sean’s JSL hands, but then he caught it. He caught the goddamn cable with the stupid robot hands! She let out a huge breath that had a bit of cry in it. Now all Sean needed to do was lift the sub seventy feet or so, and then the bad part of the cable would be pulled back onto the spool where it wouldn’t have to bear all of the load. That’s what Mickey said, and Mickey had never been wrong on any expedition she’d ever been on.
(Everybody wanted Mickey for their crew chief or even mission chief. He chose to work with the Muirs because he thought Sean’s ideas were spot-on, and he wanted to be a part of history. Thinking of that vote of confidence made Kat happy, even as the slip had frightened her almost to screaming panic.)
It was strange inside D-Plus, because at this depth, sound was conducted astoundingly well—but it was tones of voice, not the words themselves, that resounded. She could hear Sean talking to Mickey on the comm, but only the tenor of his voice. But tenor was one of anger or fear, or both, and it scared her.
She could hear the JSL whine and let out its flatulent thrusts. But then she could hear yelling coming from the JSL—
—and two seconds later, she felt D-Plus falling. Not slipping for an instant like before. No, she and the sub were falling, sinking. She immediately tried to raise Mickey on their direct line, but of course there was no response because the cable had broken. The cable that had lowered her down and was to bring her back up had, impossibly, broken, and Sean, just as impossibly, hadn’t saved her.
Very slowly, very slowly this far down, the sub was accelerating toward the ocean floor. Because of D-Plus’s horizontal lozenge shape, without attitude control it went vertical, and she found herself hanging in her buckled safety belts looking straight down into the darkness. After a few seconds, she could no longer hear the JSL or Sean inside it. She couldn’t hear anything, in fact, but her own breathing. Her own sobbing.
D-Plus would never reach its crush depth, since it was specifically designed to operate at 20,000 feet, to the seafloor, where the thermal vents were. Would she see one of Sean’s dinosaurs before her air ran out? Would she see the vents she and her husband had dreamed about, now, before she died? If she could just see the bottom for a second, an instant, see the orange light of the thermal vents, she would die with Sean a part of her, seeing the wondrous sights he always promised her were there. That was all she wished for. Just that much. Just that little.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the submersible sank and sank and finally did strike the bottom near the thermal vents, which were just as Sean had described them.
But Katherine Muir saw none of it. The air scrubbers had long since reached their limit, the oxygen completely depleted soon after, and Katherine Muir had been dead for an hour, staring into the dark with sightless eyes, before the sub reached the bottom. She died totally alone, every one of her wishes unfulfilled.
***
Filmmaker Jake Bentneus directed two of the greatest blockbusters in movie history, one (Lusitania!) a dramatization of the final voyage of the passenger vessel; and later, an even bigger hit (Prosopopoeia!) about human visitors using fictional super-advanced virtual reality to bilk the beings of another planet. Bentneus became fascinated by underwater exploration during the making of Lusitania! and learned how to pilot a research submersible in order to see the wreck for himself before filming commenced.
Also, during research for Prosopopoeia! Bentneus became deeply immersed in the real-life tech and experience of virtual reality. The twain were to meet, and Bentneus and his team sent Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) to push as deep into the Pacific as possible while he controlled them via a virtual reality interface that made it seem like he was skimming along the ocean floor. He could do this because after he had learned to operate real submersibles, he taught himself how to do it while blindfolded, storing that knowledge in his muscle memory. Thus, he could devote his conscious attention to using the robot’s cameras for his own eyes, its microphones for his ears.
Essentially, his experience was going for a dive at the bottom of the ocean without any gear on his virtual body at all.
Many known and even some brand-new species of the deep were spotted through the robot’s cameras; however, the ROV could reach only the 20,000-foot depths of the abyssal zone. The silty plains Bentneus “swam” above didn’t have as many creatures as shallower parts of the ocean, but what he did see amazed and surprised everyone on the team, and the Internet simulcast garnered almost 100 million viewers who watched the entire descent (with live commentary by Bentneus) on their 3D televisions or 2D sets adapted with a special converter made available for watching the dive.
Some got a little nauseated when the little ROV—nicknamed “Nerd Bait,” and living up to that moniker—starting shaking after a few minutes at the abyssal zone’s floor. The 6,600 pounds of pressure on every inch of the robot was finally breaking it down, literally. Nerd Bait’s cameras and microphones bent and twisted, giving a skewed view and loud buzzing before the entire robot completely folded in on itself, like a book slamming shut. In just a few seconds once its crushing point was inadvertently exceeded, the $7 million ROV turned into a pancake of scrap metal.
Experiencing Nerd Bait dying while he was still connected to it affected Bentneus in a way those watching on television weren’t, since they could look away, take off the glasses, shut off the set. But Jake Bentneus was lying on his stomach, so he had could get as close as possible to being in the ROV’s place. He wasn’t physically crushed, of course, but inside his mind he was squashed as flat as a magazine.
His crew winched up the tether—mile after mile of it—along with the tether-management system that allowed the little robot to go so deep while sending and receiving communications through fiber-optic cables. At the end was Nerd Bait, now unrecognizable in its squashed-flat condition, but given a hero’s welcome onboard the largest of the three project research vessels. Bentneus had it framed and hung it on his wall like a painting as soon as he got home.
The team’s study of the little-researched (because of the huge price) and largely alien (because of its great depths) abyssal zone was a triumph advancing oceanographic knowledge, submersible robot technology, and the widespread interest in virtual reality for extreme exploration. (The moon was mentioned as a next possible “group experience.” A Mars-rover–like vehicle with binocular vision and decked out with microphones as well as tactile feedback over bumpy ground would be so awesome, it would change lives.)
For Bentneus, however, 20,000 feet down through the eyes of a robot vehicle wasn’t enough. True, the floor of the ocean in this part was as far below sea level as the peak of Mount Denali was above it, and Alaska’s highest mountain was no foothill.
But Denali was also no Everest.
Jake Bentneus wanted Everest deep.
He wanted Challenger Deep.
Challenger Deep is a rip created in the Marianas Trench by active tectonics, a crevasse within a crevasse that already plunges far below the 20,000 feet that killed Nerd Bait. Named after the first ship ever to attempt an estimate of how deep the crevasse went (the HMS Challenger, in its 1872–1876 mission), Challenger Deep is a monumental tectonic artifact plunging from the surface of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific past the benthic, abyssal, and hadal zones, the last getting its name from “Hades,” god of the underworld. The god of the depths of Hell. These names—which describe depths far less than Challenger Deep—may give a sense of how much farther down Bentneus aimed to dive.
Only two people had gone that deep before, and that was back in 1960, their now-quaint technology allowing the team to stay at the bottom for only twenty minutes before they heard troubling c
racking noises and saw water seeping in along the inside of their bathysphere, which they didn’t consider necessarily positive developments. They also never were able to photograph or even see the bottom because of all the silt their brute-force submersible stirred up upon plopping down. Anything could have been down there—it’s far deeper than sonar can even estimate well—and they would never have seen it. Still, the two-man team set a still-standing record by descending to the bottom, 36,070 feet deep.
Everest is just 29,000 feet high.
Ghost-white animals called to Bentneus, creatures that had never seen light—and had ceased to possess eyes, since those would prove an evolutionarily useless drain on resources down where sunlight never reached. An ROV couldn’t be sent all the way down to the deepest part of the entire ocean, where the seafloor of the Marianas Trench crevasse fell away thousands of feet into that deeper canyon of Challenger Deep.
Bentneus returned from the hugely popular simulcast mission with one purpose, a singular obsession, a monomania that forced itself in front of the making of any sequels to his billions-grossing films … or doing anything else. Perhaps anyone else would be satisfied with skimming the abyssal zone, but the filmmaker demanded the apotheosis of ocean exploration, and had the resources to attempt it.
He would touch bottom in Challenger Deep, and he would stay there long enough to glean real scientific information. Long enough to let settle and dissipate the silt made up of millions of years of diatomaceous sediment, remains of everything from plankton to blue whales. It would take a lot of money, but Jake Bentneus had a lot of money and the will to spend $100 million of it in order to put together a crew to build two submersibles—it was vital to have a backup while exploring such an unpredictable environment—and send one down to the most harrowing section of the crushing deep.