Link to Part ONE
Every night, I could hear the crew talking and laughing in the communal kitchen, thankfully sober due to naval regulations. I had never been a very social person, but recently I've confined myself to my cabin for greater and greater lengths, until I was in it almost every hour I was not commanding the Pandora. My vague sense of disquiet, felt by none of the crew but Dr. Ramfield, had slowly morphed into genuine paranoia at some point in our journey. I could point to no specific instance which alarmed me, no giant tentacle out of the corner of my eye, but in my hindbrain some ancient evolutionary relic from a more dangerous past compelled me to anxiously ruminate in my room, moving to and fro without any real purpose or concentration. My interactions with the others grew increasingly fewer, only chatting briefly with Dr. Ramfield about some new odd crustacean behavior, which on its own he would ignore, but together stitched a quilt as mundane as it was unsettling. His fears fed into mine, their empirical origin justifying my instincts. As I later realized, I regressed into a horrible cabin-monster, tales of which told around the kitchen stove-fire. It took two weeks to understand my paranoia's disastrous effect on the crew. As the captain, my absence at dinner was acutely noticed, every day my empty chair at the table's head draining more and more spirit from the crew. I was an anti-leech, a life-bringer, and my paranoia had doomed the crew more surely than any real or imagined leviathan. So I decided to return to my crew once every three days, the most I could handle. This way, I thought, my crew would explain away my absence as a natural social apathy, and not—as they were now— as a recession back towards some distant evolutionary past. On my very first return, I finally understood my calming effect on the crew. I sat down at the table, said one or three responses to smalltalk, lightened and brightened their hearts. At about that time, we finally moved out of the Bathyal Zone, the last zone through which sunlight penetrates. We broke our first kilometer, and celebrated appropriately. But slowly, as if gradually revealed by some serial fiction writer, the source of my unease finally came into focus.The rest of the crew soon began to notice as well, confirming my prophetic intuitions. Dr. Ramfield, ironically, noticed last out of all of them, his myopia serving him no better than blindness. As the crew looked out the portholes, what was once joy became unease, and what was once wonder became fear. For even though the sheer tonnage of water in the Bathyal Zone crushes any sunlight which penetrates the water, our surroundings were no less illuminated at a thousand meters than they were at five.
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AuthorMy name is Sam. I like writing, reading, and watching (good) television and movies. I'm also very bad at self-description. Archives
January 2017
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