Prehistoric Beasts And Where To Fight Them

by Hugo Navikov

  The machine they created was unlike any other research vessel ever devised: It was vertically oriented, so it would conserve resources by traveling much faster to the bottom than did the 1960 traditionally horizontal submersible. Most of the length—or height—of the craft was given over to batteries, lights, cameras and other recording and transmitting equipment, and vertical and horizontal thrusters. It was only at the very bottom of the newly christened Ocean Victory that a sphere of the strongest steel on Earth would hold its lone occupant. The bathysphere’s perfect shape was its trump card against collapsing against the 16,000 pounds per square inch that would be pressing against it from all directions at the Challenger Deep seafloor. (As Bentneus liked to say to interviewers, that was equivalent to having the weight of three Hummer SUVs sitting on your thumbnail.)

  Ironically, it was the ultimate desire for freedom that made Jake Bentneus want to crawl inside a claustrophobic metal ball and sink in a straight line for three hours and then sit in an unmoving can at the very bottom of the ocean, where, at that depth, any imperfection in his sphere would make it implode so fast he’d be dead before even realizing there was a problem.

  Not only this, but every move of his would be watched not only by his three-ship crew, but also by an estimated 500 million 3D simulcast subscribers around the world. Again, the broadcast would be immersive video and sound, but this time a VR helmet was available for $199.99 at Brookstone. It was designed to shut all else out and see and hear exactly what Ocean Victory was seeing and hearing every second. In fact, if the silt were still stirred up by Bentneus’s extra-soft landing, those cameras stationed higher up on the submersible would actually be able to see better at that moment than the filmmaker-aquanaut himself could.

  But this, this was truly freedom. Doing things on his own terms. Ocean Victory was to be his in more ways than one. Nothing could crush him or his spirit. Real freedom would be his, a singularity of self and experience no one else in the history of the world had ever experienced.

  ***

  Jake Bentneus grinned and gave a thumbs-up to the video feed going out to his support crew—and also to the simulcast audience. The simulcast director on board the communications and tech ship Sea Legs would switch between cameras and mics for the audience, and a dedicated video archivist would make sure all eight cameras’ videos were recorded and saved in their entireties. There wasn’t just the 3D feature film of the entire project from conception to completion to think of; this was first and foremost a scientific mission with depth readings and core samples and temperature measurements and such. Bentneus had focused most all of his training on operating the many controls of Ocean Victory, which was a full-time job in itself.

  Bentneus thought of himself as an aquanaut, the deep-sea equivalent of Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin—or maybe Pete Conrad and Alan Bean of Apollo 12, since the 1960 dive technically preceded him. (He had also been in space—it cost him a mere $20 million to orbit with the Russians—but as a “space tourist,” not as a member of the crew, helping to expand the boundaries of knowledge.) In Ocean Victory, like the lunar explorers, he would operate the machinery, collect the samples, do a little surveying, but then let the marine biologists and oceanographers pore over the data and make theories or whatever they did. But he was the aquanaut here, not a tourist.

  His thumbs-up acknowledged by the crew on the main ship, Piranha II, Bentneus settled himself into the narrow seat and checked gauges and monitored the operational status of the main systems. They all changed as soon as the submersible was underwater, as made sense. It amused him to monitor the pressure on his cigar-shaped vessel because of how quickly the pressure increased: for every foot Ocean Victory descended, thirty-three more pounds of pressure pushed on every square inch of the entire vessel.

  Everything went smoothly, unlike the day before when choppy seas made them abort, and now that he was completely under the surface—according to his instruments, since he couldn’t see out the small porthole unless he moved the camera out of the way—he felt alone and free. The swaying while being lowered from the A-frame winch ceased immediately upon his immersion, and he was lowered so slowly into the depths that it didn’t feel like he was moving at all.

  But the gauges told the story, and he watched them with unabashed glee. “All systems operational,” he spoke into his on-head microphone, the sound of his own voice jarring in the silence of his underwater cell.

  “Roger. That makes it a ‘go.’ See you once you’ve made history, Jake.”

  He grinned. “Roger that.”

  The trip to the bottom of Challenger Deep would take a mere two-plus hours, cutting in half the time the 1960 duo had needed. The big advantage Ocean Victory had was its vertical orientation; the former mission involved an iron bathysphere inside a traditionally shaped horizontal submersible. That took five hours to reach the seafloor, allowing them just twenty minutes at the bottom before oxygen supplies and that troubling cracking (due, they surmised later, to the huge difference in temperature of the ocean and of the air inside their sphere) forced them to ascend, which took another three hours.

  Bentneus’s craft would zip to the bottom—at three miles per hour, but that was zippy for a deep-sea vessel—spend two hours doing science at the seafloor, providing commentary to the crew and millions of people around the world, then zip back up to the ship that tethered him with steel wire and the highest-performance fiber-optic cable.

  Bentneus and the crew of the support ships knew that hundreds of thousands of VR helmets had been “rented” for free to many, many K–12 schools and thousands more at a discount to hundreds of universities, so the filmmaker took it as part of his job as an aquanaut to explain to the viewers what they were seeing, while his TV director on the surface worked to switch to whatever cameras offered the most interesting visuals.

  “Piranha II is lowering me down, but at this point I would continue to descend, regardless,” Bentneus told the camera. “This baby has ballast you wouldn’t believe. But without the team, I would very easily drift off course—fatally off-course—and my telemetry information helps them let me know if and when I need to engage the thrusters. So contact with ‘upstairs’ is vital. And I get to talk to you guys, so it’s a win-win.”

  The eight cameras looking out at the ocean conveyed images of a variety of colorful fish and also of those gray denizens of the underwater world, eels and small sharks and other predators. Bentneus uttered a stream of “Wows” and “Would you look at that?” but he really got excited when he saw a larger shark swim past the camera, telling the viewers, “The fish are brightly colored to attract mates and look unappealing to predators since many fancy-looking fish are very unpleasant to eat, even for a shark. So other fish, ones without defense mechanisms such as releasing a bitterant or stinging, evolved to look like the fish no one wanted to eat.”

  From another camera, Bentneus could see that the shark that had passed by was sucking in a big, colorful angelfish. “Um, yeah … so, obviously, it doesn’t work 100 percent of the time,” he said sheepishly but quickly resumed using his “expert” voice. “What’s interesting to note is that the predators of the deep are mostly gray and white, maybe mottled, but all of it camouflages them from their prey until it’s too late for the poor fish to get away.

  “They say sharks have changed very little over the past 300 million years, and I believe it. As the seas cooled and many species went extinct between then and now, the shark adapted to the lower temperatures and has remained the ‘alpha predator’ down here. They stay nearer to the surface for warmth, even with their adaptation to cooler-water survival. Luckily, Ocean Victory is much too wide, even with its vertical orientation, to fit between the jaws of any extra-hungry sharks or other predators. Maybe a Megalodon—the biggest sea predator ever—could get its mouth around us, but, as it’s 100 million years after they went extinct, we’re highly unlikely to encounter any.

  “Try to notice that the deeper we go, the fewer colorful fish we will s
ee. This is because sunlight can’t penetrate very far into the water. Below about 1000 feet—which we’ll be at pretty soon—the darkness is almost absolute and the temperature plummets, neither one agreeing with sea life other than squid, octopus, rays, jellyfish, and other squishy creatures. So we’ll see a sudden thinning of complex organisms like fish and sharks, because photosynthesis ultimately powers every living thing on Earth—except those that live here in the deep.” BAM! That was a super-dramatic way to say that.

  He took a moment to check his gauges and report what they were registering to the crew on the surface. Then he resumed his science lesson. “But although the temperature of the water is going to be actually a degree or so above freezing, oceanographers have theorized there is a system of very hot thermal vents shooting up from the bottom due to tectonic activity below. That is because shifting of the tectonic plates beneath the ocean floor creates friction, which creates heat. A lot of heat. Giant, weird creatures like tube worms thrive down there, and who knows? Maybe we’ll find something else that likes warm water and doesn’t need the sun’s energy to survive?”

  Bentneus knew this was highly unlikely, at least if people assumed he was talking about vertebrates. But hey, his monumentally popular films were suspenseful, so why shouldn’t the long trip down be as well?

  In point of fact, he knew it wasn’t necessarily exciting for the viewers to see him reading off gauges and transmitting data to the surface, so there were probably a lot of people waiting for him to near the bottom so they could watch his landing and exploration. But if some weird creatures showed up—and it seemed like deep dives always observed some crazy animal or other—that would keep everyone watching.

  ***

  It had been an hour or so of swimming critters, but for another hour now the cameras had shown nothing but darkness beyond the glow that Ocean Victory’s own lights gave off. This deep—more than 20,000 feet from the surface—the total darkness meant very, very few animals were around.

  There was lots of floating or sinking animal detritus, which the average viewer might find boring, so the filmmaker and his broadcast team elected to show segments that would be in the feature film later. These were about the planning for the mission, the construction of the submersible, discussion of scientific goals, and so on.

  This was by design. Bentneus and the broadcast crew knew there would be dead spots, dramatically speaking, during his descent and then later during his trip back up to the surface, so these pre-filmed segments took the pressure off Bentneus to keep his patter going. They’d cut off the segments if any creature of note passed by or if something went wrong with the submersible, which would definitely make for suspenseful viewing, but even Jake Bentneus didn’t care for it to be quite that exciting.

  “Jake, we’re cut away. How you feeling down there?” his right-hand man and mission chief, Mickey Luch, said into his earpiece. When the feed was on, viewers could hear what Mickey was saying as Bentneus did. “Wanna get out and stretch your legs a little?”

  “Har dee har,” Bentneus replied, but with a smile. “I am seeing a slight anomaly in the temperature gauge, though.”

  “Should we cut into the segment?”

  “Nah, it’s the only thing that seems off. Shows the water being a couple of degrees warmer than expected.”

  “You’ll recall that we are lowering you pretty near the vents down there,” Mickey said. “Y’know, the mission plan you designed and all.”

  “I’m gonna har dee har you again, and don’t think I won’t. Nobody wants that.”

  Mickey laughed.

  “Actually … yeah, have Kevin up there take us live again,” Bentneus said, and waited through the lag for Mickey to tell him they were back on the air. “Hey, folks, we have something strange happening here, something no ROVs or the 1960 expedition ever reported. The temperature gauges—and we got a lot of them—are saying the water is at 6 degrees Celsius, so almost 43 degrees Fahrenheit! That may not sound very warm, but I’m thinking something is malfunctioning with the external thermometers. Mickey, what do you think?”

  “Yeah, Jake, the internal ones are working just fine, got you at a steady 24 Celsius.” Bentneus harbored an intense dislike for the Celsius scale, because it made impressive numbers look mundane. So he converted the temperatures in his mind: 24°C was about 76°F. “But you’re still 6000 feet from the seabed. The thermocline should have settled down pretty close to one degree Celsius, but no more than 4C that deep.”

  “That’s between 34 and 39 degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “What? Jake? Your air scrubbers not working down there?”

  “Talking to the viewers, Mickey.”

  “Oh, right, shi—um, golly,” Mickey said, sounding as natural as a third-grader in a school play. “Anyway, that temp is much higher than anyone’s ever recorded. I think, yeah, your thermometers are on the fritz.”

  The camera inside the bathysphere showed Bentneus flipping some switches and even tapping on some analog dials, whether they were thermometer readings or not. “All of them at once?”

  “Kevin, cut back to the documentary stuff.” Mickey waited a few seconds, then said to Bentneus, “This couldn’t be sabotage, could it?”

  “What? Did we have some—oh, hell, you mean the Muir murder, don’t you?”

  “It just makes me itchy. Her husband—”

  “—is safely ensconced in prison. You and I both vetted this team, so relax. Put that shit out of your mind and get the live link back up. I just saw something big pass by down here.”

  “At 30,000 feet? Maybe it’s a giant squid—”

  “And maybe you could tell Kevin to go live again, now, please. Have them review the video and see if you can get an ID on whatever that was.” The support vessel Sharkasm (motto: “I just love salad”) could access a computer database that would almost instantaneously tell them what they were looking at in any video or still image. Sharkasm was equipped with the most powerful and robust computers and modulator-demodulator technology Bentneus’s vast fortune could buy.

  If a statistically almost-impossible (but still extant) coelacanth swam by Ocean Victory’s cameras, the system would name it in nanoseconds. If an extinct ancestor of the coelacanth appeared, the system had the chops to identify that, too.

  The truth is that the bottom of the ocean has been explored much less than the surface of the moon. Anything could be down there, and that’s what the stack of servers back in Guam in communication with Sharkasm would identify and Holly Patterson on board would confirm.

  Dozens of albino shrimp and twenty-foot squids (not to mention weirder creatures with no immediate zoological analog) were routinely identified during seabed missions 13,000 feet shallower than the bottom of Challenger Deep. But if they ran across something the computer couldn’t identify—an entirely new species!—Jake Bentneus would catch it on camera and advance science for real.

  That is, if anyone knew he was doing it. “Mickey, I’m not seeing myself on my video feed. I am feeling … unhappy.”

  “Right. Sorry. Here we go.” Mickey conveyed Bentneus’s concern over the radio to Sea Legs and the millions watching were treated again to 3D views of the filmmaker sitting inside his sphere at the top of their screens and the bottom half showing what the exterior cameras were seeing … which was still just blackness with a light snowfall of organic detritus that he would be touching down on soon.

  “Welcome back, world,” Bentneus said with a smile. “You’re tuned in at just the right time. The temperature, according to my gauges, is—man, oh, man—seven degrees Celsius, which is forty-one degrees Fahrenheit.” All the vital equipment was digital and could be fine-tuned upstairs, but Jake had insisted that old-school brass instruments be installed in his cockpit (even though they were still operated by computer to expand or contact the mercury in their glass tubes according to exterior digital sensors).

  The radio crackled. “Jake, recalibration is done on the thermometers. They’re all operating perfectly.
It really is 7 degrees down there.”

  “Wow, forty-one degrees. Holy cow, that’s a true scientific discovery—or data, anyway,” Bentneus said, “but we have a lot bigger news. Whatever the real temperature is out there, something large, much larger than anything you’d expect this deep, passed me by just a minute ago. Our support team is poring over the video data to identify what this could have been. The safe guess is a giant squid or sizable octopus, both of which can go deep indeed. Certain species of octopus have actually been seen at the bottom of abyssal zone seabeds, so who knows what we’ll find. Exciting, isn’t it? Mickey, let’s have a look at that video. Sharkasm has to be done with the ID by now.”

  “Um, yes, it’s finished …” Mickey sounded perplexed and nervous.

  Bentneus waited, knowing feed viewers also waited. “And?”

  “It’s probably a computer mismatch, but …”

  “Come on already, Mickey. We have enough suspense with me daring to go down this deep.”

  “It was a perfect match with, um … Jake, it’s a Liopleurodon.”

  Bentneus laughed incredulously, then repeated, “A Liopleurodon, as in ‘Liopleurodon, the species of dinosaur that went extinct ten million years before the meteor wiped out the rest of the dinosaurs?’ That Liopleurodon?” The filmmaker was a bit of a dinosaur nerd.

  “That’s what—I, um—do you want Kevin to run the video?”

  Bentneus looked into the feed camera, which always kept his image inside Ocean Victory on-screen, and rolled his eyes for the viewers’ amusement. “Yeah, Mickey, I think the world would like to see an impossible dinosaur at 31,000 feet below the surface.”